eleven...

We now have an eleven year old living in our home! Meagan's birthday was yesterday...but it's really been a week-long celebration...and it's not over yet - she received some gift cards that she still needs to spend! :o)

Since Sunday was Father's Day, we thought the day could do double-duty and we celebrated Meagan's birthday too. Meagan asked for ham, funeral potatoes, and peach salad for dinner. Yum! For the last several years, she's asked for cheesecake instead of cake & ice cream for her birthday...this year she decided to have something totally different...Fruit Pizza! Yum again!

She decorated the pizza herself - she insisted that she didn't want candles, so she made an "11" with the strawberries - clever, isn't she?

We had already gone birthday shopping with Grandma the previous week - because she wanted to pick out some clothes and other fun girly things. But Grandma still had some surprises for her to open on Sunday. She was thrilled to get Limited Too gift cards from her aunts & uncles. And the biggest surprise of the evening was from Aunt Rhonda - tickets to see the live performance of High School Musical at the Capitol Theater later this summer.

We spent the evening playing baseball (or some funny version of it) in mom & dad's backyard...sometimes the best fun is totally unplanned!

On the morning of her birthday, I woke up before she did (which is a small feat in and of itself...she's an early bird and I'm a night owl...she almost always wakes up before me) and I left a note on the pillow next to her:

She loves McDonald's Bacon Egg & Cheese biscuits...we all like them actually...so this was the perfect birthday breakfast.

I wasn't surprised to find her awake when I returned home.

Next, she wanted to open her presents - of course! She asked me to wrap everything...even though she'd picked it all out and knew everything she was getting. It's still fun to open the presents, right?!? She was surprised to find some cash in her birthday card...so we'll have fun shopping some more later. :)

We spent the day enjoying the sunshine, had lunch at Mom & Dad's, and she even called Brad while he was working to ask him if we could go out for dinner to celebrate her special day.

She was supposed to have a softball game at 6:30, but we decided to skip it and we went bowling instead. We even ate dinner at the bowling alley. ;)

And no birthday is complete without a sweet treat at the end of the day, so we stopped at Sonic for ice cream.

As the day wound down, she asked if I would do one more thing for her birthday - watch a movie with her before she went to sleep. We put in "The Little Rascals" and laughed a lot...it was the best way to end her special day...her eleventh birthday!