Happy B-Day Meg

Today we had our family celebration of Meg's birthday. It started last night when we caught a ride with a friend to the grocery store where Meg got to pick up what she wanted for her 'birthday dinner' along with cake, ice cream, candles, and a few other accesories. I think this may have been her favorite part of the festivities.


This morning she woke up to find that Kaddi and I had blown up balloons and placed them around her presents. Opening up her presents, which included (of course) Polly Pockets was a great start to the day, although she was a little disappointed to learn that we weren't going to take her to Subway immediately following church.

In the afternoon we ran into a few snags as we prepared for the dinner. Meg had selected pasta with butter (which the kids practically lived on in Thailand) masshed potatoes, and peas as her special meal. Despite our preparations we had forgotten to get both peas and margarine. I managed to procure some margarine by knocking on doors here in the ghetto, but sadly there were no peas to be found. We also planned to write 'Happy Birthday Meg' using decorative icing on her cake, and discovered we had no attachment to go on the end of the tube of icing. But Kaddi persevered using a Ziploc sandwich bag and managed to scrawl out 'Happy B-Day Meg.'

When it was finally cool enough to go outside we had cake and ice cream down at the picnic tables. The Hawaiian breezes made it almost impossible to light candles, but we managed to get four out of seven lit at one time and Meg quickly blew them out. We finished our cake and ice cream and then let the kids play in the street.

Thankfully Meg seems to be young enough to not be affected by life here in the projects. I'm more worried about Jake, though. When we asked him what he wanted for his birthday said he said a Lebron jersey, a diamond-studded crucifix necklace, and some gold teeth.