The Big Day

Today is the day Quinn comes back from Richmond. And normally that would be the lead story for the day, but today was even more special. It was "Free Comic Book Day" (FCBD) at comic shops across the nation. So since we know how much Quinn likes comics, we all headed over to a comic store today so that Catherine could get some comics to give to Quinn as a present. And while it was "Free Comic" day and we got a bunch of free comics, we also spent about $26 also since Catherine found some Disney Princess digest comic books that were $8 each (seriously, when did comic books get so expensive). After we left the comic book store, we then headed by Toys 'R' Us to pick up some last minute things for Quinn's party.

Once we came home we started getting ready for Quinn to show up. It's been a tradition that I usually bake cup cakes for the kids birthday's, but since I'm still not feeling well, I decided cooking and potentially sharing the germs with everyone wasn't the best idea (Ginger still tries to maintain that I'm just reacting to pollen, but I'm fairly certain this is a cold or something which admittedly is probably worse than it would be normally due to the pollen). So instead of my cupcakes, Ginger tried a new idea. She made cupcakes in ice cream cones. It was a pretty novel idea and it worked way better than I was expecting it to when she first explained it to me. The only thing is that the cone part tastes a little odd after it's been baked again.

When Quinn showed up and he was really excited and told us all about his NASCAR adventure and showed off his new cars (as if we didn't have enough miniature NASCARs, now we have 9 more). Not long after that we had Quinn's party where he pigged out on chocolate cake (which Ginger also made, she was a domestic goddess machine today). Then Quinn decided he was going to open up a couple presents. This quickly turned into opening all his presents and became his typical whirlwind of destruction as he tore into everything, stopping only occasionally to examine what he had just opened before moving with extreme haste to the next present. Now normally I would have tons of pictures of the event to share, but once again I made the stupid mistake of starting to take pictures before checking the camera's settings. This time it was in portrait mode as I was taking all these shots, so there will be something in the picture in perfect focus, and the rest is ever so slightly out of focus. This is really starting to get irritating. But if nothing else, one would hope I will start obeying Pavlov's rules soon and I'll check the camera's mode before I start taking pictures. The only reason I'm not more upset is I know Nana and Pop Pop were both there taking pictures with their cameras, so I'm hoping they got some good shots and will feel like sharing them. I did use Picasa to work on this shot of Quinn and I think I got it to at least passable by using the sharpening effect (for those interested the camera had picked the drinking cup in front of him to actually focus on, you can see it's sharper than anything else).



After all the presents were opened and played with some, Grammy and Pop Pop and their clan headed home (unfortuantely that's the best picture of them that I got, but people shots get exponentially harder to take as you add people to the picture). The kids played outside with Nana some more after that, and Nana left once the kids were ready for bed.