A GREAT, GREAT Birthday!

Yesterday, we got together at my parents' house to celebrate my mother's 77th birthday. As you can see by the cake I made for her, she is now a great-great-grandmother. It was probably not the "greatest" cake I've ever done, since I very hurriedly decorated it that morning, but it turned out okay I guess. The inscription on the left says, "lucky 7's" in case you can't read it. As a birthday gift, my mother had requested a "work day", meaning all of us would come out and work on the list of things that she wanted to get done around the house. That's what we did.The above picture is their lowest-level family room, that my husband Ray had covered in poly, so that he could re-spray the ceiling that had some water damage from a broken pipe some time ago. He also did some plumbing and who-knows-what-else around the house. He's pretty handy at such things. My sister Kathy did some work on the downstairs bathroom that she's been redecorating for them for awhile now. My brother Bob was filling in grout in the kitchen tile etc. She had my brother Dan fix the doorbell that wasn't working, while everyone else was busy cleaning and doing all sorts of odd jobs around the house. I'm thinking that my "job" was the easiest of all. I took all the kids, (which consisted of my daughter, Molly who is almost 12 and five kids between the ages of 3 and 5), and put together a gingerbread house with them.
I was thinking that it wasn't really "work" at all to me. I was pretty much in my element, hanging out with little kids, and decorating something with an icing bag. The only problem was, that with all of those little "helping hands" adding candy decorations all at the same time, the frosting glue that was holding our little gingerbread house was loosened up, and the whole thing eventually collapsed. Oh well, we had fun doing it anyway, and the most important part of my job had been to keep the kids out of everyone else's hair while they did THEIR jobs. I suppose I succeeded at that.

They did manage to each decorate a gingerbread snowman while we were waiting for the house to dry. Unfortunately, I didn't get a picture of the decorated house before it collapsed.

My dad had another great idea to keep the kiddos entertained. He is a "retired" heavy equipment operator and still owns a lot of excavating equipment...and still likes to play with it.

He had pushed a pile of snow together, while plowing the driveway, and decided to make it into a great sliding hill for the little ones. It worked wonderfully, and the kids all had a BLAST on it.

This is Molly, giving Christian a push down the hill.

He would laugh his little head off, all the way down the hill and for a few minutes after he'd reached the bottom. I was having fun just watching the kids.

When the work was over, we still had to celebrate Mom's birthday too, of course. The really cool thing was, that my niece, Missy was able to come out, along with her daughter Kasey, her son Kurt and Kurt's daughter, Mya.

Kurt and his little "dolly", Mya are pictured above.

Does Missy, the gal in the baseball cap with her daughter Kasey on her lap, look like a grandma to you???

Would you believe my sister Laurie is a great-grandma???

Or, does the lady trying out her new bike that her kids got her for Christmas here, appear to be a great-great-grandmother to you??

Here they all are, 5 generations of the Felix family:

(l to r), Great-Grandma Laurie, Great-Great-Grandpa and Grandma Felix, Grandma Missy and Daddy Kurt. And of course, Mya, (their "great"est grandchild), is on my mom's lap.

It really was a GREAT day, wouldn't you say?