birthday party&Mary Poppins
Ingrid’s second 5th birthday party went well. She walked into a room decorated all red, with Clifford the big red dog decorations dispersed throughout. The St. Louis bunch were all there. There were no kids but she didn’t seem to notice. I think she enjoyed being the center of attention. This year, there was no shyness at all. It seems that living on the road has really changed Ingrid into a social butterfly. Kind of funny, since whenever I tell people she’s home schooled, I get the “oh, I would love to do that with my child, but the socialization is so important…”, it’s always something along those lines. Well I can tell you first hand that Ingrid has no problem socializing with other children. She is different than most her peers, in that she hasn’t learned to call other kids names, or hit them, or make fun of them. Also in that she is comfortable around adults, and can easily stay and have a conversation with an adult.
So a room full of adults was no problem. We played Clifford trivia, pin the tag on the Clifford, and drop the dog bone into the 2-liter bottle. It was all extremely fun for Ingrid. She enjoyed laughing at all of our attempts to win the prizes. In the end, all the prizes somehow ended up in her bag and she didn’t really notice anything suspicious about that (or maybe she did, but decided not to bring it up). There was a chocolate Clifford cake and even a pinata! The pinata was not actually Clifford, but one of those little Mexican toros. The funny thing is that Ingrid ran up to me and whispered excitedly, “Mommy, it’s a bighorn sheep!!!”. The big horn sheep is her current favorite animal. Nice work, Grandma!
The day after the party, Grandma Pam took Ingrid and I to see Mary Poppins the play. It was playing at the Fox theatre, which I’d never seen before then. It’s a really old theatre, renovated, even with it’s own pipe organ. The show was spectacular. Mary Poppins flew over us in the end! We weren’t allowed to take photos during the show of course but here’s one Pam took outside while waiting for the show to start.
