Lukas' birthday, the day

In case you have been wondering why we haven't been blogging, no, we didn't die.  Shortly after Lukas' birthday, the monitor on our computer started humming and I planned to return it to Costco since it was within the 90-day window.  Then the very day before I planned to return it, the hard drive crashed!  That took longer than we hoped to resolve (and we still aren't 100% back on our home computer, but pretty close).  Today I returned the old monitor and got a new one and we're back to blogging!

So back to where we left you, on February 22!  Lukas, Konrad, Jordana and I went whale watching with our homeschool group on the actual day of Lukas' birthday.  Tom stayed home with Dominik and to pick up Natalie from school, since he's already seen whales and I never have.  We had a lot of fun!  Dramamine is an important part of me having fun on a boat, by the way.  We didn't see any whales, but we saw hundreds of dolphins.

The kids didn't have a lot of patience to keep watching for whales, so pretty soon they were inside the boat playing games.

Common dolphins

Pacific white-sided dolphins

That evening Jake and Kathy came over for dinner.  Here Lukas is selecting songs off Tom's iTunes to make a disk.

Lukas requested Pasta with pesto for his birthday meal.  I put the meatballs in the shape of a 9.  I had to point that out to you, because you can't really tell in the picture.

Lukas requested a marble cake (vanilla and chocolate in the same cake...since he couldn't decide).  A few days before I asked if I could just buy one from Costco (you can tell we do a lot of shopping at Costco!)  He really wanted me to bake a cake, so we compromised on one cake of all the same flavor:  chocolate!

 Happy Birthday Lukas!  Have a great year being 9!