When having triplets is beneficial

Rich and I decided to hold the girls' birthday party this year at a place for kids full of big bouncy/jumpy slides, houses and obstacle courses. With this particular place, you are renting the entire warehouse sized room for your party. No sharing or annoying, rowdy kids to worry about. Another benefit of holding their party out of the house was that I did not have to clean the house, which I never have time for anyhow.

The initial cost of this type of thing is not too expensive but when you start adding in pizza and juice boxes and water, it all adds up pretty quick. It was a pretty penny, I tell ya, BUT we only have one party to pay for. So having three who share one birthday does have it's benefits.

I did attempt some quick line-up photos before we left for the party but Anna was being uncooperative. There's always one who doesn't want to cooperate.

Here are the girls waiting for the fun to begin.

The girls had a blast. I am really glad we decided to do this for their party. Here are a few pictures I took inside the party place. This first one is of Anna going up the ramp for the big slide. I was really impressed that she was able to do this on her own. It was fairly steep.

Now here's where I talk about the importance of knowing how to use the manual settings on your camera. It was a bit dark in the party place and the ceilings were much to high to bounce a flash. I bumped up the ISO as high as it would go (not very high on my camera), set a low f stop and then set a slow shutter speed. They are a bit grainy but the alternative was using a direct flash.

Em at the top of the big slide.

(In upcoming posts, I will talk about the importance of checking that your ISO has been returned to a low setting before other photography occurs.)

The girls are slow eaters. Very. slow. eaters. And our time in the "party room" was limited. We really needed to do the cake thing so I shuffled Allie and Em, who had pretty much lost interest in their pizza, over to the birthday throne. Anna was gnawing on her crust and when I asked her to join her sisters on the throne, she growled, "Noooooooooo," at me.

Em and Allie waiting for Anna.

Allie only ate half of a slice of pizza (remember she has those molars coming in) and when the girls returned to the table to eat their cake, Anna sat down in front of Allie's pizza, picked it up like she had just left it there and started eating. We have a saying about Anna: She could eat 'til the cows come home. Unfortunately, there were no cows here just a teenage attendant telling us that we had 8 minutes to clear out. Note that it was already 8 minutes past when we were supposed to have originally cleared out.

I love this picture of the girls waiting for the cake to be brought over to them so that they (or Mommy) could blow out the candle.



Okay, so that's the birthday party recap!