E Turns Eight
This marks the beginning of our birthday marathon.
In keeping with our pre-COVID habits, we celebrated E's birthday while we were on vacation. It wasn't a new country or anything, but it was the beach at least! And she was excited to have things back to "normal" haha! She did get to pick what we did that day (the beach), and she also got to pick her birthday dessert, of course.
She picked shaved ice, which everyone was really happy with after a day at the beach. Like I've mentioned before, it's a lot like sno-cones, except that the ice is shaved much thinner, so you get a lot more flavor. It's not as sweet as sno-cones though, although now that I say that, I'm not exactly sure how that works. And, as you can see from the pictures, you get toppings on it, usually chewy type things. My favorite is taro balls, which are the purplish things in E's picture. She also has sweet potato balls (the orange things) and tapioca.
K is really into ice, but you know we didn't want to get him a whole thing with all that sugar. And it's a real pain to share with him since he's CONSTANTLY asking for another bite. So I just asked them if they would be willing to give him a bowl of plain ice. The girl looked at me like I was insane and asked me if I even wanted no sugar syrup? I said yep, just nothing but ice. She didn't know how to even ring it up, but after some discussion with the boss (who looked like he was probably her dad) they settled on about 25 cents and K got his bowl of ice. Oh my goodness, I'm not sure I've ever seen him happier. His own bowl! He spooned away until he was soaked and all that was left was a bowl half full of water. He loved it!
Once we got back to the hotel, E opened the gift we had brought with us. (Actually we had it shipped to the hotel... I'll leave it to your conjecture as to whether that was because we planned ahead that way or because we waited so long to order that it wouldn't arrive before we left.) It was a board game from her grandparents and actually it turned out to be super cool! The girls had a great time playing that night, and since then they've enjoyed it many times over. I know it's kind of hard on E to always be gone for her birthday, she doesn't usually get parties when it's that way, but I do think she really enjoys the vacation birthdays. Who knows where we'll celebrate next year!