Gracie's 10th Birthday

Sorry the pictures are so blurry! I forgot to bring our nice camera along, but thankfully Sammy had brought the little old junky Sony along, so we got a few pictures. :-/ That poor camera has been dropped so many times that I think the motion stabilizer has gone quacky. Poor little Sony...

Grace's birthday was on Wednesday the 24th, but since there was church we waited to celebrate till the next evening.

The Martins lent us a very funny book called Cheaper by the Dozen (which, I'm sure you've heard of). We brought it along, but Ry got ahold of it, transporting himself into his own world. :)

Wow, 10 years old already! It seems like yesterday that Grace was born. 

Ben had the honor of holding the cake while we sang. The singing sounded bad, of course. That's half the fun of singing happy birthday, to see how bad it sounds! :) JK :)

Here's a cellphone video of the last part of our singing. I hope it works. This is the first time I've tried uploading a cellphone video.

We had confetti cake with pink frosting, vanilla and birthday cake ice cream. Good choice, Gracie!

Grace had just one present to open- from us.

A Farm Science Kit and coin purse...

...pencil, mints, candy necklace, and a growing horse.

The pile.

Enjoying a good book and ice cream in great company... What could be better?

The little people came running in saying that there were some really neat clouds that we had to see! So I grabbed that poor excuse of a camera and snapped a few blurry, but serviceable shots. 

Riding bike by the highway.

 It prob'ly wasn't very safe to let them ride bikes by the highway with a big storm moving in. I guess it's different in the country, safer somehow. 

Of course, throwing road dust.

It started to rain, so we headed back shortly after this picture.

Last shot before heading in. It rained good and hard for awhile, but not quite enough to give the ground a good drink.

I just wanted to tack this picture onto the end of this post. I had entered a picture of Sam, that Abi took, into the yearly Our Iowa photo contest. The contest has four categories, Corn Fed Kids, Iowa People, Iowa Humor and Iowa Scenery. I entered Sam's picture into the Corn Fed Kids category. Well, Sammy's picture got picked out of 200 other pictures by the Our Iowa staff! Wow! You can see his picture among the others, but we think his is the cutest! :)

Here's the picture I entered. I love the missing front teeth!