Nonna's Birthday Came Early this Year

With Nonna's Birthday falling on Christmas Eve it often times get smashed into Holiday events. This year we tried to surprise her with a special dinner a few weeks early, but Jon failed to tell Pepe it was supposed to be a surprise so she knew about it ahead of time. Luckily we still had a few things up our sleeves and we had a wonderful evening celebrating Nonna.

Reed loves a good party and was extra excited to help decorate when I told him we could put balloons and streamers on the Christmas tree. He however was not a fan of my girly color scheme and declared he would pick out the balloon colors himself. Pair this with Kieran's love of balloons and all things within his reach and we had a fairly interesting half decorated Birthday tree! I did try to set the table at least fairly elegantly and  Jon worked hard all day smoking a big roast.

Dinner was a lot of fun and we ended it with some yummy vegan pumpkin bread pudding Reed and I had made together. C is definitely the artist of the family and so contributed a cute Birthday sign and a very thoughtful take on the book "Goodnight Moon" called "Goodnight McClartys" in which she explained that all of us kids/grandkids are going to move in with Nonna for a whole weekend. Nonna was beyond thrilled by the idea of having us all to herself for a whole weekend and we have already started to plan some of her favorite activities to do while we are there. Nonna is one of those people who truly means it when she says she doesn't want a gift or that the best gift is time with all of us, so hopefully we can make the weekend a very special one for her.

In true Nonna fashion we spent most of the night doing what her Grandson wanted to do, mainly reading books and watching Dad, C, and Tio play Mario Kart. Marty was traveling through town and even stopped by for some of the festivities. Nonna had a great night and hopefully the party will continue in a few weeks with our family weekend!