Rain, rain, go away

It is the Saturday in between three children's birthdays...so we had a party. I do not want to make a habit of lumping Josie's birthday with the boy's, but she is only two and hasn't really developed her own set of friends yet.
We planned to have the party at a park. We rented a shelter near the bathrooms, and near the play equipment. We sent home notes with everyone in the preschool class and only got a few people calling for regrets saying that they could not come.
It rained. It rained really hard in the morning. We also did not think about the fact that this park also has at least four baseball fields that were all in constant use despite the rain so parking was interesting.

However, it all worked out.
We did have a few friends from preschool and a few from other places. The park we picked has big trees so the play equipment was wet but not too bad considering. We had a hot dog picnic with three birthday cakes. Our babysitter showed up with his sister's brand new puppy who was the hit of the party. We had a pinata that roughly looked like a space ship. The space ship actually flew when the older brother of one of their classmates hit it and the fish line it was hanging from pulled out...then he whacked it open on the floor of the shelter and Jim ripped it open enough to spray the candy out.
The parents seemed to have a good time as everyone sat and talked and most everyone stayed past the published end of the party.

We went home, gave the kids a shower, put on new clothes, and then headed out to another party. A little boy in our church is exactly one year older than Doug & Andy. The kids played on his big outdoor riding toys. When it rained we shoot balloon rockets off the porch, ate cupcakes, and had potato chips. When it had mostly stopped raining the kids went back out and got muddy playing with the toys in the yard.

Then we packed up the kids, headed home, changed clothes again, picked up a pizza, and dropped them off at the baby-sitter's apartment. Andy in particular has wanted to have a sleepover there and when I mentioned it to Ben he thought that was an okay idea. So we left all three kids with their sleeping bags and a small bag of clothes.

Jim and I ended up with free baby-sitting and were able to go out to a nice dinner.
Not a bad day.