Celebration!

            What a weekend we had!  First, on Saturday morning my three middle children and I headed out to the local airfield where they were given the amazing privilege of a free flight in a little airplane complete with educational information and for my oldest son, a chance to try his hand at the controls.  This awesome morning of aviation and education came via the young eagles program, a program found all over America and worth checking into in your area.  

            But, as exciting as that was…Sunday was even better because Sunday was our youngest child’s third birthday.  Yes, our baby is now **officially** a big girl.  Being three is a pretty big deal.  How do you celebrate something so monumental?   

            Birthday parties are great and our children love them, but Tim and I sort of decided years ago, that parties to celebrate birthdays would be VERY few and far between in our family.  It is not that we have anything against parties, it is just that they tend to be a big production.  Between the expense, the planning, the clean-up (both before and after the party), and the chaos of over-excited, full-of-sugar, wound-up-from-party-fun children running everywhere- it feels as though we do not get a minute to really enjoy the celebration with our child or connect with them at all at their parties.  

So, instead, in our family, we prefer to celebrate birthdays with fun family activities that we can all enjoy.   In July, our oldest son turned eleven and we celebrated by renting canoes at a local park where we could row through the inter-coastal waterways of Tampa Bay.  We have gone camping for birthdays before or spent the day at the zoo or science museum… things like that.

Planning a family activity that would thrill a three year old and still be fun for the older children proved to be a little difficult though.  What is fun for a three year old tends to be not quite so exciting for an almost 14 year old.  So, in order to make the celebration as exciting as the milestone- we spent the big bucks and bought tickets for SeaWorld!  This is huge for our family.  We just don’t go to amusement parks because the expense of getting our family of seven into any of them is insane on our budget.  

However, as Florida residents we were able to get a special deal to pay just a smidge more and turn our 1 day passes into fun passes for the rest of the year.  We will go back in September and celebrate our oldest child’s 14 birthday there as well.  Then, just for fun we will go at least one more time, later in the fall, to make quite sure we get our money’s worth.

Since this first trip there was for the little one’s birthday, I explained to the older children we would only do things the little one could participate in.  They agreed and did not complain once, even as we started our day at the Elmo show.  The big fancy roller coasters were overhead all day, twisting and turning and snaking through the park right above us as went from show to show and rode all the “kiddie” rides in “Shamu’s Happy Harbor” but no one suggested ditching their little sister and riding them.  We walked through the "Wild Arctic" passing by the entrance to the "helicopter ride" that I know the older kids were anxious to check out, so we could still see the polar bears and beluga whales even though our youngest was too short for the ride's height requirement.

mesmerized by the Elmo show

Shamu amazed us all

A big girl, but still little compared to a polar bear!

exhausted by our long day of fun and excitement.

Instead we really did have our fun family day, centered completely around the birthday girl.  We all enjoyed watching her watch Elmo and friends sing and dance on stage before her very eyes.   We delighted in her joy at riding a fiberglass manatee on the Sea Carousel and seeing the animals jump and flip at the Dolphin and the Shamu shows.  We laughed at how cute she looked wearing her blinking dolphin necklace, the one souvenir we agreed to purchase.  It was a fabulous day for all and a true celebration of our youngest member.  The day turned out to be just exactly what a birthday should be-  a joy filled day of remembering and reveling in the blessing that our baby three-year-old is to us all.