On May 23rd, we celebrated Nina’s birthday! It’s hard to believe we have a 14 year old in the house already! She’s fun, artsy, athletic, smart, and has a great heart, and we’re so proud of the wonderful young lady she is. Thirteen was a great year for her, and even though 14 is starting out in quarantine, we hope for all the joy and success for her in this coming year. On most quarantine days right now you can find Nina doing art at her desk that faces the window (she loves looking out the window into the back yard from her desk), talking to her friends or family, or playing outside. Although the track season was cut short due to COVID, she plans to get back to hurdling, running, and high jumping when this is over. She’ll start at Independence High School in the fall (gasp!), and her favorite meal as requested for her birthday this year consists of Chick Fil-A nuggets, mac n’cheese, watermelon, and chocolate cake.
I mentioned her favorite meal above, however, it should be mentioned that while that would be her favorite lunch or dinner meal, donuts, BY FAR, are her favorite breakfast. It’s pretty much a consistent trait in the Simpson house - we all love donuts, so it’s how we start off celebrating most occassions! Since her birthday was on a Saturday there was no school or work to get done, so after a full donut breakfast, she opened presents. Her birthday request this year was to have her two besties, Grace and Emily, over for the day, so the girls came around noon, and after lunch they started into a full water battle amongst themselves and the neigbors.
We are so hopeful that the pools open at some point this summer, but until they do, I think there are going to be a lot of these water fights to have fun and keep cooled off on hot days.
After finishing the water battle, drying off and hanging out for a few hours, we had Nina’s birthday dinner request and, OF COURSE chocolate cake!
Nina and her two friends took a walk to the park so we could set up the next phase of the birthday day. Lyla had wanted to make this next part a surprise, so while the girls were out on their walk, we set up an outdoor “theater” in the driveway. We don’t have an outdoor projection screen but found that a white sheet taped on the garage door worked just as well. I set up my projector and played the movie through my laptop, and it was awesome! For a JV set up, I was impressed with how well the movie looked and sounded. It was such a beautiful night and perfect for watching a movie outside. Nina picked Tangled as the movie they watched, and when things finally wrapped up around 10:30, we dropped Grace and Emily off at home and called it a night.
For a quarantine birthday, Nina said it was amazing and actually one of her favorite birthdays ever, so we were glad that she had such a fun day and enjoyed the occasion to celebrate her.
Since her birthday fell on Memorial Day weekend, we took the cloudy day on Sunday to recover a bit from the party day on Saturday as well as get some jobs done around the house. However, Monday was set to be another beautiful day, so we took the bikes back to the C&O Canal, and this time biked the opposite way on the path than we took a few weeks ago. We biked 17 miles on the trail, but had some fun on the way riding down big grassy hills on the bikes. The C&O Canal is a beautiful trail to bike on, and it’s quickly becoming a favorite place of ours to ride. After we made it back home, Mark got busy on the grill, smoking jalapeño poppers, making wings, and grilling burgers. It was a fun family day and a beautiful day to enjoy being outside and active together.
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