Max’s birthday

But the rest of it was pretty fun too.

He woke up for the traditional birthday breakfast early since Elle had summer school and Grace had volleyball camp and had to leave at 7.

Here he is with some of the teenagers in crazy evening sunlight.

Let’s just go ahead and excuse the fact that I only brought my iPhone for picture purposes.

Our family has never been to a concert.  The last time I went to a concert I think I was 18.  We had heard from friends that this one was such a great family-friendly one and we love Imagine Dragons so we were in.

And it was awesome.

I have a video my friend took of Claire singing all the words and almost crying because she loved it so much, but I can’t get it to upload right now.

I think it’s safe to say we all had a good night on Max’s birthday.

Thanks Max, for giving us a good chance to celebrate!

The next night was his real surprise party.

Dave had the awesome idea of using our new neighbors’ pool for the occasion because man alive, it sure is set up for a party.  They were out of town and were so nice to let us have free-reign over there.

Here we are setting up…

Max had volleyball practice from 4-9, but Dave went and got him early.

Here are some of the boys waiting to surprise him…they didn’t’ want to waste any time…

We wouldn’t have done it during his volleyball practice but literally there was no other time we could do it and the coach was totally good with it.

There’s no way Max would leave volleyball without a really good excuse so Dave thought of a really good one:  He picked him up all worried and told him our neighbors got robbed and the police were questioning everyone who had been around that day (and Max had been at our new house across the street working his tail off with his new job of helping with anything that needed to be done through construction).

So he believed him hook, line and sinker.

He was wondering what was up when they got there and there were no police cars were around…

Then Dave took him around back where we all surprised him.

I wish I had the video of that too, because he was kind of surprised yet kind of horrified.

He is one that does NOT like to be the center of attention.

His eyes were as big as saucers until he realized this was going to be fun.

And it sure was.

He was fine as long as we didn’t make him blow out his candles and sing to him.

So we did that the next day.

But back to the party…

Although Max was mortified about being the center of attention, the girls sure were excited.

Such cute helpers:

…and a cousin and her friends came too…cuties.

There were probably over fifty kids all helping us celebrate the big day.

Some of the last stragglers to leave:

Have I mentioned how much we love this boy?

…To the moon and back.

Forever and ever.

More about that back here.