Jane's actual birthday

On Jane's actual birthday, Chris had to work most of the day and evening. He ended up coming home for an hour in the afternoon to celebrate this girl so we could have her open her presents and have cake. That morning, though, we ended up going to the park with some friends who also were free that day. The park turned out to be much more of an adventure than we had initially planned. There is a playground area there but we decided to take a nature walk together on some trails behind the playground. There was a big, wide path that we started out on, and we had gone down it a little ways when we decided to head back on a slightly narrower trail that looked like it curved back toward the playground. We kept walking and the trail kept winding but at this point, the older kids were running far ahead and having a great time so we weren't too concerned. After about a mile or more, we started realizing that all the winding was clearly not taking us back toward the playground, which began the first of many deliberations about whether we should push on forward "because it has to be a loop and we can't be far from the end" or whether we should turn around and head back the way we came, which would be a guaranteed long walk, but at least we knew it would only be one or one and a half miles. By the time we had gone probably around two miles, I started the Map My Ride app on my phone because it shows me trails while biking and I thought I might be able to pick up what trail we were on. It didn't have any of the trails in this park mapped (that I could see), so a bit later down the trail, someone else started looking up trail maps for the park on their phone. She found a park map, but then thought we were on a different trail than the one we ended up being on. We continued to forge ahead and finally found a trail marker figuring out which trail and what point on the trail we actually were on. At this point we had walked well over 2 miles and the older kids were getting tired. We figured out on the trail map which trails we had to connect to to get back onto the trail that led to the playground, so we successfully navigated back out of the woods, but not without a stretch of the three moms carrying all five children between us. All in all it went fairly well...all of the kids were a bit on edge by the end, though.

That afternoon, Eleanor absolutely insisted that Jane get her own birthday string so she could "show her" how to follow it and open her presents. What ended up happening is that Eleanor opened all of Jane's presents and Jane couldn't have cared less. The second picture shows Jane playing in the background while Eleanor and her friend check to see what Jane got :)

Jane got to take another pass at her cake as she wasn't really into it at our small group party. This time she really liked it.

JaneCake from Katie Stratton on Vimeo.

Happy birthday, Jane!