Since July 1st was Emma's birthday and she wanted a Mickey Mouse party, Larry and I threw her a Mickey Mouse luau! I had so much fun last week putting together decorations and making plans and everything turned out so cute!!
I didn't make the cake. Publix made the cake. :) This is the only Mickey Mouse cake that they have permission to make and this is where I got the luau idea. I was skeptical at first but I was able to find so many cute things that I was really, really happy with it and I really, really got into it, too!
I got this idea for the punch on Pinterest. It was soooooo adorable and the punch was awesome. It's Blue Hawaiian punch and lemonade. That's it. Equal parts. Awesome.
I love the beach, I love pink flamingos so I was ALLLLLL over this tropical, beachy luau theme!! Larry and I decorated the backyard with flamingos, a toucan, fishies, hibiscus garland, paper lanterns, beach balls, a hula girl, two coconut monkeys and we even got a pineapple and two coconuts to put on the table. We had Mickey Mouse ears hats, noisemakers and we all had leis to wear.
It poured down rain most of the day yesterday but that didn't stop Larry from grilling those hamburgers!
And here's our sweet Emma. She was so excited about her Mickey party and that made all the running around, planning and scheming that I had to do last week so very worth it. Just look at that face.
Since real fireworks became legal in Georgia July 1st, we had an incredible show in our neighborhood once the sun went down. We bought some sparklers and things to do with the girls and they just had the best time lighting those with PawPaw.
Today, our sweet neighbor, Randy, let us borrow his pool and really all it did for ME was convince me that we have to have a pool. It was just too much fun! Look at Larry jumping off the diving board!
We had the juiciest, sweetest watermelon and pineapple today. The coconuts were a little past their prime but that pineapple mmmmmmore than made up for it. Here's Larry teaching Elizabeth how to cut watermelon with a machete.
I made bacon-wrapped
Oreos last night and chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast this
morning. We had birthday cake, ice cream, hamburgers, a summer luau, some pool
time, awesome fireworks, sweet juicy summer fruit, the girls picked a cucumber and a bell pepper from our garden and our Charlie Girl is getting stronger every day. We are so blessed.
What a day!! After staying up late with the birthday festivities and fireworks displays, we all slept in. Rhiana got up and her and I went out on the veranda, kicked back, and while we drank cowboy-strength coffee, talked about things we needed to dust off and pump life into. It was good stuff. Sometime during our schmoozing Ginger had shooed away the cobwebs and had busted the frying pan WIDE open with chocolate-chip pancakes and enough bacon to decimate a herd of swine. We poured Mrs. Butterworth on those stacks like we were just out of the gates of Auschwitz! There was so much squealing going on you'd have thought we had hit the lottery. And, in a way, I reckon we did. Ginger is a grandma in that sweet way that made a trip to your Maw-Maw's always the highlight of the summer/spring/fall/winter. She speaks the language of everyday folks, of working souls that toil under the wings of F-15s, of mothers loaded down with chores and love, of people of faith, and those struggling with what faith is in their life, and that peculiar patois that is a voice both child and kindred spirits hear. I don't know how she does it, and wouldn't pretend to know how to replicate it. I just witness and revel. So the adventure of this weekend has not so much closed as it has once more eclipsed expectations and ushered in this blossoming of a woman into the powerhouse persona we know as, dare I say it--Gama Ginger (the girls version of Grandma). LARRY SCHNEIDER
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