Leah turned 10 yesterday.
My how time flies.
We had an action-packed day.
She awoke to the traditional cherry cheesecake for breakfast and the singing of happy birthday and she blew out all 10 candles quite handily.
She got a nice array of presents, many of them horse-themed or Harry Potter themed, including a Harry Potter trivial pursuit game that she can ace like a champ. The kid is Harry Potter and Horse crazy - if they ever combine these two themes, like Harry Potter dueling death-eaters via a cavalry charge - world watch out.
So she set up her horse stuff (A barn, some horses and a vet clinic) and played with them for a while and then played the Harry Potter trivia game with her sister.
Then we had lunch and took her out for a trail ride on horseback at Mayberry State Park. There was a long waiting time which we dealt with by playing the Harry Potter trivia game. Luckily, we got to ride just before the weather closed in. It was a near-run thing considering they almost cancelled our ride because of the storm coming in on the radar but we chanced it and it was a great ride. We were in a nice line of horses and had a very picturesque and pleasant western-style ride for an hour on the State Park riding trails.
Then walking slightly bow-legged from our time in the saddle, we fled the incoming storm after getting off our horses, then battled traffic, and took her to Black Rock for dinner. At Black Rock, we started with a tower of Onion rings and then went on to their feature - cooking a steak on a 750 degree stone right at the table.
Basically they bring you a chunk of sirloin on a sizzling hot stone and you then cut it into pieces and sear it on the stone to your desired level of doneness, which can take seconds. Basically it was awesome and a fun way to have dinner. The kids shared a sirloin and each got their own rock to cook it on and had a great time. We finished up with a Black Rock volcano - a huge ice cream/brownie/whipped cream mountain surmounted by a huge waffle cone and a sparkler on top for her birthday. Note: That one dessert was more than enough for all 4 of us.
Then to home to relax for the kids and some more salvage work for me to continue what I had begun before the horseback ride.
I had not yet mentioned that our sump pump had apparently missed a beat last night or early last morning, even though it is running fine now, and that led to some water in the basement?
Not Baton Rouge levels of flooding by any means and we got off quite lightly with only a small section of about two hundred square feet of carpet and stuff getting wet with only groundwater and not inches of it, but there's nothing like doing your kid's birthday at the same time you're extracting water from the carpet, throwing stuff that is wet out, drying what can be salvaged and running fans to dry the area. So yeah, it got a little bit complicated there but we pulled it off. Overall, since we responded very quickly and discovered it fast, it looks like the carpet will be ok and we''ll just be out the cost of renting a ton of high powered fans and the carpet water extractor. Nothing like getting up in the morning of your kid's birthday to discover that a section of your carpet is squishy.
So even with complications, Leah had a great birthday and turned 10 in style.
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