My baby is 11 years old...

Samantha turned 11 on Friday! John's mom threw a lovely surprise party for her with her friend Joyce and the 2 other kids she watches... Samantha had a nice time with that and I think she was truly surprised... And, I was touched, it was such a nice thing to do... Then John's nephew Ryan came over with a card for Samantha from his family... again I was truly touched...

We let Samantha pick where she wanted to have dinner and she chose CiCi's Pizza Buffet... then when we got home she got to open her presents... Her main present was a new & bigger bike which she loved...

On Saturday poor Samantha had to work before her party... first thing in the morning we went out by the bridge in our neighborhood to install the kiosk the homeowners association purchased to keep the portion of the community who doesn't have Internet informed... We hired a guy who lives in the neighborhood & does construction to install it and we helped a bit... Samantha helped me go to the creek to get a couple buckets of water to pour in the post holes with the Quickrete...

After that we went to our neighborhoods community clean up day where poor Samantha had to work some more picking up trash around our ponds and at the entrances to our neighborhood... When we decided to trim tree branches at the entrance she asked if she could go home... lol...

Trimming the tree was quite an adventure... there were bugs all over the branches that we loaded into the back of my Element... they didn't bother me at first but after a while I felt like they were crawling all over me... And then when I went to pull out onto the main road all the branches fell out of the back of the Element into the street! Thankfully everyone was very patient while we got them cleaned up...

Finally it was time for Samantha's Birthday Party! She was so excited for Tara to come over and spend the night... Kelly and Tim hung out with us and we had a cook out... And then later in the evening the girls watched their 80's movies... They absolutely loved "Sixteen Candles"... I told the girls how when the movie first came out my best friend Carolyn and I had gone again and again to the hairdressers to get our hair cut just like Molly Ringwald in that movie and how disappointed we'd been each time that we looked nothing like her... My precious little angel says: "Well, your hair looks like hers now Mommy..." It took me 25 frickin years but I finally got the Molly Rinwald in "Sixteen Candles" hair cut!