Happy Birthday, Dear Monkeeeeey...

In between all of the entertaining and keeping the bouncing-like-maniacs kids from actually having heat stroke, there was little time for a proper photoblog of the Monkey's birthday soiree. I did manage to get a few pics though that kind of captured the day a bit...
________________________________________________________

The Monkey rocks the fauxhawk! This is technically unrelated to his birthday, but it was such a great picture I had to share it. Note the TMNT jammies...and note that when he requests the fauxhawk (and he does...nightly), he requests it by its proper "fauxhawk" name...


See? ...I really did make a Power Rangers cake. How can you be sure I made it? Because it's in a throw-away roaster pan from Food Lion, that's how! :) Fairly credible representation, right? Most of the 4 year olds knew what it was anyway...so that's something.

...this was the only action shot of the day from my camera. I'm only sorry I couldn't catch the Monkey holding hands with Inera, the funky future-raver girl (not shown here, sadly...she wore a rainbow striped shirt, an orange, asymmetrical hemmed skirt and orange socks with pink shoes -- and her mom was in shorts and combat boots :). They held hands a lot, the Monkey and the RaverGirl, but they were always on the go, which made them very hard to catch on film.

For those of you keeping up, this picture features both Cora and Ingrid -- part of the original trifecta of best friends (Trae, the third point of the triangle, was out of town -- boo!). Also shown here is James, the original best friend before the Monkey knew what best friends were (I don't think they'd seen each other since probably January, and let me tell you, James didn't leave the Monkey's side the entire party...not once). Not pictured here is the reigning queen of best friends, Kaitlyn-the-curly. She's not in this picture because she wouldn't get out of the bouncy thing. At all. Her parents managed, with no less than Herculean effort and threats, to fish her out once for water and then once more for cake. Clearly, the girl came to bounce...and bounce she did!

...there was a lot of this right after the party: him squatting amid a bunch of random stuff looking kind of happy and dumbfounded all at the same time.

Me? I'm a purist. I stuck with dumbfounded.