Birthdays are Precious

What an unexpectedly BLESSED day!  My heart is SO happy right now, it's filled with a Joy only JESUS can give!  Today was the first time I've ever celebrated a birthday of a child of my own (well my own foster kid) and what a Joy...now I know why so many moms spend so much money on their kids' birthdays.  Well, I didn't spend hardly anything, but it's easy to see why they get so carried away.  The feeling you get from bringing such special celebration to a life can easily be forgotten when it's only done once a year and you could easily think you had to have spent a lot of money to make that happen right?!  Wrong!  Today's birthday party was planned, put together, attended, enjoyed and over - all within 8 hours - AWESOME:)  I haven't been planning anything more than a simple family cake and dinner for the last couple days, but all the sudden today as I was putting the cake in the oven and looking around the kitchen I suddenly realized I had plenty of what I would need for dinner and then some so why not invite some of our kids' friends.  We don't let the kids have sleepovers or spend much time with friends because we live so far from their friends and we don't have enough time to really establish friends in our immediate area because of their crazy life schedule with visits, etc.  So we invited only two families, both have kids that our kids have spent significant time with AND they were both able to come!!!  It was so awesome and the kids got along great and ate well and let the parents chit chat which hardly ever gets to happen either!  We had so much fun and were just so excited to be able to spend some precious catch up time with the adults too who we have missed so much...thank you Lord for a precious day and the excuse of celebrating a beautiful life to make it happen!!!