Visiting Santa and Celebrating Emmie

Saturday was all about Emmie! At our house you get to pick what we do on your birthday and also pick where we go to eat and where we go for dessert. My kids spend all year planning their special day.
Emmie's big request was to go see Santa! She was SUPER excited. Her siblings were not nearly as excited. I was glad I had Paul there to help!


I thought Ellie would be fine but apparently she was quite intimidated by Santa. She did finally warm up at the end. Santa was very patient with her and I know she was glad she finally talked to him!

Ruthie had said before we went that she was NOT going to sit on Santa's lap but JP would! (Poor JP, totally got thrown under the bus!) Ruthie did say that she would stand beside Santa or sit with Emmie. Yeah, right. In the picture below she is screaming because Paul was HOLDING her right next to Santa. Little girl wanted NOTHING to do with him!






After we saw Santa Emmie choose to eat dinner at Moe's. JP is not a fan of tacos so we swung through Chick-fil-a and got him some nuggets and then headed to Moe's. They all quite enjoyed it! (And if you missed my video yesterday of JP discovering salsa definitely check that out!)




After Moe's we headed down the street to get frozen yogurt. We pulled up only to discover they were permanently CLOSED! Emmie was devastated. Thanks to Siri we quickly found another yogurt place and the crisis was averted! Since we were celebrating they got to eat their cookie from Moe's AND their ice cream. It was a perfect day in their book!


When we got home we decided to start a new birthday tradition. The birthday child gets to stay up for awhile after all the other kids go to bed and hang out with Mommy and Daddy. Emmie was so excited and she chose to play games during her extra time with us. She chose Go Fish. She seriously NEVER wins any game we play. Ever. But she won Go Fish! I was so excited for her! Then she let me pick a game and I picked Sorry. It had been a long time since she had played and Paul hadn't ever played. I don't know if Paul enjoyed it (he got "sorried" a lot because I wasn't going to sorry the birthday girl!) but Emmie did. I ended up winning and she came in second but she kept saying she won. I think because she beat Paul. Since it was her birthday we went with it. She was so excited! We had a GREAT time having some time with just Emmie. She is at a really fun age where she can do things like play games independently and I loved getting to spend some more "grown up" time with her!