Lucy’s birthday & conference weekend

She has written numerous “books” leading up to the big occasion and has sent a whole slew of funny text messages to make sure people were aware.

Oh, and there have been follow-up texts as well…

That girl is a pretty great texter I tell you!

The day started off with the traditional candy bar poster:

…and birthday breakfast.

Claire was pretty excited about her wrapping job and to give some art supplies to that little sister of hers.

Max sent her a special birthday letter from Taiwan.

It made me cry when I read it, and it made Lucy’s face go like this:

My heart has been spilling over a lot lately.

One of her favorite gifts was her very own pineapple.

For reals.

She sure loves those things.

But I think the gifts from her two sets of grandparents took the cake.  My parents sent her a dog.

…who she has lovingly named MAX.  (Dave has been telling her there are “rules” and you can’t have two Max’s in a family but she’s not buying it.  Elle was wondering when she FaceTimed her later in the day why she didn’t name that new little dog of hers Elle.  But no, it’s Max and boy she loves him.)

Every girl needs a good little dog partner to watch the first part of conference with right?

Her other grandparents gave her $20 and that happened to be the exact amount that she needed to buy the American Girl doll she’s been saving money for for a year.

Can you tell she’s pretty darn excited about that?

So we went to the American Girl Doll store where she plunked down all that money she earned plus her birthday money and we got another new member of the family:

Lea the American Girl Doll.

It was an “off” year for birthday parties but Lu still had a few girls bring her over the sweetest gifts.  Wish I had pictures with them all, but at least I remembered on one:

Lucy has the sweetest, kindest friends and we are so grateful!

We all packed up that afternoon to head out to camp (more about the why’s of that in the last post, but camping is her birthday tradition and she was determined we were going to do it right this year).

The first plan was to bring the birthday cake with us, but on second thought we decided we better eat it before we walked out the door.  Note how Claire is already ready with her camping backpack…

…and I love that Emma happened to be there when we cut up the cake…

We took forever to leave, but finally arrived at a camp site just in the nick of time to nestle in between some other campers (boo! wish we could have found something a little more remote) and pop up our tents before the light faded.

Lucy decided there should be a talent show of sorts.

Grace and Claire played a ukulele number:

And the birthday girl herself told a story.

The crowd was mesmerized:

HA!  We forgot camping chairs so it was a little bit not-so-comfy around that fire of ours.  And that’s my brother there on the end…we were so glad he could join us!

We cooked up the tinfoil dinners Dave had whipped up for us when we were out getting Lea…

…ate some pretty delicious s’mores.

Oh my word, he is so good at that stuff and he taught me to take these pictures.

I took these!!  I was so excited!

You have to leave your shutter on a really long setting (we did 15-20 seconds) and we were so excited out there just capturing all that beauty of the night sky.

I loved that you can see the lights rising up from the nearest town in that last one.

And I love that you can see the outline of my brother in this one:

I couldn’t resist staying awake amidst my slumbering family for a little bit to capture the view from our tent:

I talked about this pic. yesterday:

We packed up and listened to the morning session of General Conference on the way home…

…as we drove through the most gorgeous rain storm.

Pretty glad that didn’t hit while we were sleeping under the stars!

Back at home our sweet neighbors brought over a little gift for Lu:

…and shared some of our traditional conference cinnamon rolls.

We watched the last session of conference snuggled in our family room…

…and then sung happy birthday one more time to that birthday girl with cousins that night.