Birthday Sunday

Akila's birthday is on this coming Thursday. I'm ready for it to be over. We have a tradition in our family (that we started before we were familiar with the FASD beast {I mean FASD is a beast, not Akila}) which entails the Sunday before a birthday being "Birthday Sunday". This is when we mainly celebrate the birthday if it falls upon a week day when daddy is working. On birthday Sunday, the birthday kid gets to choose a restaurant and an activity, and gets the choice to open presents that day or on their birthday. Believe it or not, some of my kids have chosen to wait til their actual birthday. Not Akila.

She obsessed yesterday about her presents and begged ALL DAY to open them, or just one, or just two, or blah, blah, blah. I would have preferred to just give them to her, but Michael wanted me to wait. That was fine. I did break down and we made a birthday cake last night. That seemed to pacify her. We usually reserve the cake for the actual birthday, but we can have two this week, I don't care. Everybody loves cake!

Last night, I told her that she could not wake anyone up until 8:00 am to open presents. It might as well have been Christmas morning. I am so glad I remembered to tell her that. As she woke us up at 8:00 sharp. I was proud of her for waiting. Not sure what time she got up though. She opened her presents, played with them for a bit, and was ready to go.

She usually chooses Red Lob.ster for lunch, but I am not a big fan. I don't like any kind of seafood, and have never been impressed with their non-seafood choices. I talked her into Bubba Gu.mp Shrim.p at the Mall of America and it was awesome!!! The food was great, and the service was excellent. They have license plates on the table that say "Run Forest Run" and "Stop Forest Stop". You flip it to the stop if you need something and someone comes right away. Well this is fantastic for a family with a special needs child. They came every time, right away. Not that we used it too much, but it was nice.

Then we rode a few rides at Nick Universe, and when it was time to go, we had no problems. Nama Kathy (our neighbor who is like a grandma to the kids), had presents for Akila so I told Akila it was time to go home to see Nama Kathy. She bolted out of that place like never before. Came home, opened Kathy's awesome gifts, and played the rest of the day. She even played with Imani and the neighbor girl pretty nicely all afternoon.

But I am glad the anticipation part is mostly over. She just can't handle the excitement, she goes totally bonkers and so do I. Wednesday is the party with the teenagers, and Thursday is the real birthday, but it will be somewhat anti-climatic. Not sure if she gets that. I have explained it a million times, that she will have nothing fun on her birthday now, but I"m sure she doesn't totally get it. She does get to choose the meal I cook on her birthday, and we will probably have some cake.

She starts a summer school class in the morning for 3 weeks, I am looking forward to it. I can already tell she is going to be fighting me on going. She has been talking about it all summer, wanted to sign up, chose the class herself (sewing and quilting), but was fussing about it tonight. I think she is too worried about missing out on excitement at home. Like we will be partying the whole time she is gone. More like we will be trying to get some things done and having a bit of time with no craziness and conflict.