Ruby and friends have a birthday kingdom adventure

I'm gonna have to say that Ruby's birthday party was a success.

The preparation was actually minimal, in part because I was in the MICU, and post call the day before. The birthday cake was baked the night before, but I didn't dare try to decorate or assemble it until the morning of the party.

Gramma took care of the menu which included pansit, chicken adobo, lumpia, watermelon, grapes, cherries, and pizza. We started cooking only one hour before the party started! Grandma and I had an assembly line going for the lumpia--she arranged the filling on the wrappers, then passed it to me so I could roll it and seal it. Miss Bae and Addy Patty's grandma joined the assembly line towards the middle, and together we made one hundred lumpia. They all got eaten. In fact, at the end of the party, we didn't have leftovers.

Ted planned Ruby's Birthday Adventure, modeled off of Dora. He made a map for the kids to follow:



The birthday crown had been lost, and we needed to find it and return it to the birthday kingdom so that we could eat the birthday cake. The kids found the birthday crown in the front yard.

Then they went through the tickle forest. The parents were the forest, and the kids had to walk through while the music played. When the music stop, they had to freeze. If they forgot to freeze, the got tickled by the tickle forest. Carson liked getting tickled, so he kept going back and forth through the forest and never froze with the music.

Then, they had to cross the river with the zipline. Each kid got a chance to put on the harness and ride the zipline. Even the smallest ones got to do it, with a little help from mom or dad.

Then we sang to the "singing tree," and when the singing was loud enough, we got a pinata as a prize. Here's a video of the pinata-busting, complete with annotations. It was nice to find a short video that showed all the kids. (Except for Charlotte, the twins, Beau, and Nisani, so I write about them in this blog.)



After the pinata, we returned the crown to the birthday kingdom, had cake and ice cream, and opened presents.