Party for Syrena!

We threw Syrena her birthday party this weekend, it was a great success I think. Before the party I had a long anticipated appointment with my hair stylist to get my hair done. She moved to Vegas and comes out once per month to do hair out here, so I have waited nearly 3 months for this appointment. I had Eric take a "before" and "after" picture... I tried to do the thing on TV where they look mad or sad in the "before" with no make-up, then they are all happy in the "after" one.....

"Before"
"After"

Anyway, so I love the new hair. :)

While we were preparing for the party, the kids were going crazy over the Halloween stuff - they are way jazzed. They decorated the whole house and decided on activities for the party (the only one I can remember was Tommy's 3rd activity: Punch That Skeleton - it made me laugh all day long). Here's a pic of them in Halloween costumes.... Yes, Syrena is being a cat again this year... Tommy is actually being a skeleton, but he didn't have his costume yet. When we went to pick them out, I let him know that they don't let you have masks at school, so he threw a big fit and promised to blow the school up. He did finally relent and pick one out yesterday.

Lots of people showed up for the party which was awesome, we even had surprise guest, my Aunt Kari from Vegas came! It was so much fun, Eric's family was all there too.

Syrena has so many way neat presents, mostly dinosaur themed - which she loves. Eric and I got her Roller Coaster Tycoon for the Xbox. She loves that game - had on the PC but lost it and we can't the PC to work properly right now anyway. We also got her an iPod, which she totally freaked out about. It was really fun to give her that and see how happy she was, such a grown-up present! I also took her horse-back riding on Sunday.



Here she is on her horse, Sarah. This is the same horse that Eric rode when he took me for Mother's day last year. They used this horse as a model for Rain in the movie Spirit. A little known fact that is so cool to me. It had been raining all day Saturday and all night so they said the trail was too muddy. They asked if we'd like to ride around in the arena instead... well I didn't want to disappoint Syrena - drove all the way out there and everything, so I said yes. It really wasn't a whole lot of fun riding around in a dusty dark arena for an hour. I guess maybe it was a good way for Rena to get acquainted with riding, but it was boring. Right at the end they let us walk down the trail a little ways and come back and she loved that part. It was a lot of money to spend on an hour's entertainment ($70), and I felt it was way too much for what we got. I hope that soon we will have our own horses, or at least access to someone else's, so she can get a better experience.

Final note, Broncos won again. This time our defense looked awesome and offense was more patient and it paid off. Won against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, brings our record to 4 (wins) and 1 (loss).