Happy 90th Birthday Grandaddy!

Happy Birthday Grandaddy!


My grandaddy turned 90 this year on Dec 22 so we decided to celebrate with a big birthday party! How many times do you get to do anything 90 times??? What an accomplishment!


Grandaddy, Brayden and Marshall patiently waited for permission to blow out the candles from the ladies in charge (if you look closely at the picture you will see the candles were already burning down quite a bit at this point - I can't believe the little ones were so cooperative!)






Here's a good one of all the brothers and sisters with their Dad. I can't remember now what was said to get everyone to smile (including Grandaddy!) but whatever it was, it worked! :)










My mom, the veteran school teacher, and Aunt Patti made sure the kids had lots of activities to keep them busy during the party. They had talked with the North Pole and found out that Santa's elves had been out joy-riding on Santa's sleigh the night before (to relieve a little pre-Christmas stress) and some presents had accidently fallen out of the sleigh over Aunt BB's yard (ok, so this isn't exactly how they told the story, but you have to admit, my version is funnier... ;). The kids had a great time finding the presents...however they got there. :)



Here are a few pictures of our family taken at the party by Janet Carden of JCardenPhoto - Thanks Janet! If you are interested in having some wonderful pictures taken of your family check her out at jcardenphoto.com.

Marshall's Preschool Christmas Field Trip and Christmas Party

This is a picture of Marshall's Preschool class with Santa taken during their December field trip to Columbus, GA to see a production of The Toys Take Over Christmas at a local college. Sorry for a lack of details...William took Marshall this time so I don't really have any insider info! :)

Kudos to Mrs. Leigh Ann for helping 12 kids paint matching reindeer shirts to wear. If you look closely you will see that the reindeer antlers are the kids hands. So cute! :)

The next few pictures are from the party they had on the last day of school. I went to help set up for the party and took Jack with me. He wasn't very interested with playing with the other younger brothers and sisters that were...he wanted to be right in the middle of everything with his big brother. And I must say,

big brother and his friend Annie were very gracious and even shared their party treats with Jack!

Marshall's Debut Singing Performance

Marshall sang in front of an real audience (other than his adoring parents, that is ;) for the first time in the Tiny Kids choir at church this Christmas.

The planners knew when working with this age range (2yrs - 4yrs), short attention spans were a potential problem. So they only had the kids sing two songs, Go Tell It On The Mountain and Glory to God and they passed out shakers at the beginning of the second song to give the kids something new to concentrate on (to try to lengthen that attention span as much as possible).

Despite this, the kids managed to go from angelic to...something decidedly not-angelic by the end. If you take a close look at the pictures, you will get an idea of how the performance progressed, beginning with everyone roughly facing the right direction and singing the right words and ending with the boys playing with the microphones, bonking each other on the head with the musical shakers and making faces to entertain the giggling crowd (and yes, Marshall was right in the middle of it!).

All in all, the audience throughly enjoyed themselves and the kids learned a little something about the real reason for the Christmas season. I'd call that a sucess any day! :)