Angel's 9th Birthday

Angel is SO into legos these days, she decided to have a Lego themed birthday party!!

Grins made the sign for the front door (with his very own legos, I might add!)!

 We turned our 'gratitude' tree into a "Heartlake City" tree (the Lego friends city)... Notice the snow outside....Angel has the special tradition of having a LOT of snow on her birthday, every single year since we moved to Maine.  The past three years the snow has been severe enough to have school cancelled.  This year, her birthday party fell on Saturday, so there was no school to cancel, but it was still a pretty good sized snowstorm!  We were surprised so many people ventured out to come to the party!

We typically limit parties to 8 friends (actually, the number of years old that the person is; they get 3 friends when they turn 3 and so on, up to 8; the max.)  But Angel has SO many friends, and we couldn't decide whom to 'leave out' so we invited them all - and they all came!  There were 18 kiddos at the party! Phew!

With a lot of allergies in the group, we decided to do a rice krispy treat "cake" (no eggs, dairy or gluten).  Not glamorous, but they enjoyed it! :)

We painted nails, made friendship bracelets and played LOTS of fun games (human knot, Apples to Apples, pin the dot on the lego, etc) but I was so busy running around I didn't take pics of any of those....)

All in all, though, it was a fun time!  A few days later, on her ACTUAL birthday, she played the role of "Queen for the day" in style:

 Getting serenaded by distant loved ones on the phone...

 ...and via skype.

And of course, lots of love from her brother and sister made it a pretty special day indeed!  We are so very blessed to have this sweet girl in our family!  Love her to BITS!