Keeping Up With...Family (February Birthdays)

Every year we spend the first week or so in February celebrating. We have Zak's birthday on the 8th, Daniel's on the 10th and then my niece's on the 15th. So between those 3 birthdays, Valentine's Day and often Superbowl Sunday in one week, we just celebrate all week around here! This year things were even more spread out as we tried to keep parties small so everyone stayed safe and healthy. Here's how we celebrated our favorite week of the year this year!

Saturday - We gave Zak an early birthday present, his own bowling shoes, and then I joined him and Adrian for bowling this morning. He didn't bowl great, but he loves his new shoes! Then we came home and got a few things together and headed out to my brother's house for our first party. We celebrate all 3 February birthdays with tons of play time for the kids, a delicious dinner, a 3 layer cake and of course presents! We enjoyed our evening there, it was a very fun way to kick off our week!

Sunday - We got up and got our work done quickly so we could continue the celebration. Daniel had a friend come over to hang for the afternoon. They had a fun time play video games and catching up in person instead of just over texts. She brought him a great handmade present and we all had cupcakes together. After she left, the boys had some free time while Adrian and I watched the Super Bowl and enjoyed some appetizers. We all watched the halftime show together, none of us were impressed, ha! Then we had an early bedtime since there is a busy week on tap.

Monday - It's Zak's actual birthday today!! Unfortunately we had a regular school day today, but we still made the best of it. Adrian went out to get fresh Krispy Kreme donuts for us for breakfast. His class sang to him on Zoom and everyone finished their work quickly so they had some extra video game time this afternoon. When Adrian finished with work for the day, Zak opened his presents and then we got packed up and headed to Urban Air for his birthday party with friends. We had a great group of kids and had so much fun on the trampolines, Wipeout course, ninja course and high ropes course. We also enjoyed pizza and cookies and most of us got coupons to go back another day. Zak got a lot of great presents from his friends, he was very excited about all of them. It was a late night for us, but we all had a blast so that's all that matters!!

Tuesday - We woke up to snow and were hoping for a 2 hour delay for a little more sleep but that didn't happen. So we got up and got to work on our schoolwork for the day. This day is usually the calm between the storms to catch our breath and this year was no exception. We finished up our schoolwork and the boys got some more extra video game time. We enjoyed Jets pizza for dinner and had cookie pizza for dessert to celebrate both Zak's birthday and National Pizza Day. We finished the night with family movie night watching "X-Men: The Last Stand."

Wednesday - It's Daniel's actual birthday today!! Once again, it was a school day but thankfully it's a work at your own pace day and we have 3 of our friends over today. His buddy Patrick brought over (more) breakfast donuts for us to enjoy together. Then everyone worked really hard and very quickly so they could finish everything before lunchtime. Zak had a virtual Valentine's Day party with his class which was fun for him since he's missed out on all of his class parties this year. When everyone was done with school, they headed upstairs to play together for the rest of the day.

I made Daniel's choice for dinner, cavatelli and cheesy bread. After dinner, I headed to work for about an hour while Adrian cleaned up from dinner. Then we opened Daniel's birthday presents and he was very excited about all of his new art supplies. After presents, we had homemade Oreo ice cream cake and watched his choice of a new show 'The Hollow" before heading to bed since we still have one more day of school left this week.

Thursday and Friday - We got an awesome surprise on Thursday when I woke up to a phone call from the school saying that we were getting an actual snow day today! We used almost all of our calamity days to start school late this summer so I thought we weren't getting any snow days this year. We were all super excited to get the day off!! The boys spent all day Thursday and Friday playing video games, watching YouTube and finishing our puzzle. Thursday night I cooked tacos for Zak's choice for his birthday and twe had leftover cake and cookies for dessert both nights. We checked out another new to us show, "WandaVision" and we all love it! And we had another family movie night on Friday watching the live action "Mulan." It was nice to have a few days to catch our breath and catch up on a few things around the house that we hadn't been keeping up with.

Saturday - We finished our birthday celebrations today with Daniel's birthday party with friends. He had 5 friends come over for pizza, cake and video games this afternoon. Two of them went home late at night and the other 3 spent the night here with us. They enjoyed snacks and video games until the wee hours of the morning, very little sleep happened at the sleepover. They all had a great time, especially since some of them haven't been together in person in almost a year! We finished up the party on Sunday morning with bacon and chocolate chip pancakes before everyone headed home. The 5 of us spent the whole day Sunday relaxing and recovering from the lack of sleep the night before. It was a great week of celebrating 2 of my favorite people!!