Happy seventh birthday, Bug!

Milly’s present from my parents arrived yesterday.  I was showing them all the things you can do with a Roku (though they’ve already got one) and mentioned that I thought about getting one for Milly, so my mom told me to order one for her from her Amazon account.  I set it up and loaded a few apps, like the Disney Channel one.  With a Roku 3 you can plug a headset into the controller to mute the TV and stream the sound to your headphones, so that’s how I found Milly this morning.

I got up and made pancakes and eggs for breakfast.  I stuck the “7” candle from Milly’s birthday party into her stack of pancakes (though I still had to hold it up) and sang Happy Birthday to her.  Tristen brought out the rest of her presents, just some little things she got for her here and there, then Tristen went to work.

One of the first things we did was to play a fishing game, one of those dealies where the fish open and close their mouths and you have to fish them off the board.  That reminded me that my parents had also brought a game of Twister for Milly.  Tristen and I planned to use it for Milly’s party, but forgot, so I gave that to her and we played it a bit.

I had some work to knock out in between playing and spending time with Milly.  I took breaks in between to check in on her.  One of the things she’s enjoying on the Roku is Disney music videos.  She showed me a few, telling me before one of them that she thought I’d like it.  It’s really cool to me that she’s making comments like that on subjective matters like musical taste.

We left to go get lunch at Atlanta Bread.  We were there for a while, just chatting.  I can’t even tell you what about at this point, but I enjoyed it.

After that we walked down to what used to the toy store that used to be Brilliant Sky.  It changed to Towne Toys a while back and it’s going out of business now, which is sad to me.  Milly used to love going in there.  She went so much that some of the people knew her by name when it was Brilliant Sky.  We looked around there for a while and I bought her some color changing putty and a board game for myself.

Then we walked right next door to GameStop.  Milly’s friend Braden is obsessed with Minecraft and she’s been wanting to play it for a while, so I figured I’d look and see if I could find an inexpensive used copy, which I did.

We went to Barnes & Noble after that, spent most of our time playing games on a Kindle.

We were planning to go to the pool, but we didn’t really have time for that.  We did go to the Arboretum though.  We fed the fish a lot of old hotdog buns.  Milly’s pretty sure she saw some of the small fish get swallowed up when the larger koi would come at the bread sometimes.  She touched the koi a couple times, and every time she did she’d get splashed.

Then we walked around a bit.  They were redoing a good bit of it, but Milly took me around like a tour guide.  We ended up wading in a stream.  Amanda met us there.  They had some Chick-fil-A dinner and I headed on home.

After Amanda dropped Milly off at the house we fired up Minecraft.  Well, I got it started and let the Milly and Tristen figure it out.  I was catching up on work from the day.

Milly and I are almost done with Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.  It’s hard to finish a book in a timely manner when you read it for bed every other weekend, and even then not all those nights if there are other things going on.  We do make up ground in the summer though.

Almost every time I read to her though, Milly makes a point to tell me that she’d going to close her eyes, but she’s not going to sleep.  She’s wrong every time, usually within a paragraph or two.