Kendall's 3rd Birthday, the Real Thing

Kendall's birthday was on Sunday. It was a gloomy, rainy, cold Sunday to boot. Everything a November birthday seems to always be. I feel really sorry for all little kids who have cold-weather birthdays after having my own with one! We decided to make the most of it and choose to do something indoors but that we had never done before. Because of the weather, super fun, never-done-by-the-Webbs-before ideas such as Christmas lights at Dollywood were out. Process of elimination (and much prodding from Chip) took us to Sweetwater, Tennessee after church. Yes, folks, we took our 3 year old to The Lost Sea for her big day. She LOVED it. The only time she cried was after the steep hike from the "lake" which just so happened to be happening about 2 hours after her regular naptime. And, we're talking about Sleeping Beauty here, so skipping nap to hike through a cave is a big deal for her!

We got there about 30 minutes before the next tour, so we waited patiently infront of the big yellow tunnel. It was, not surprisingly, easy to keep the kids out of the gift shop. Most of the knick knacks and "souveniers" most certainly had been sitting there since 1983 and were unrecognizable to our children.

Thanks to my flash and lack of time to figure it all out, this photo looks like it was taken in the middle of the "lights out" segment of the tour. Regardless of what you believe, I promise this was taken about 90 feet below where our car was parked outside.

The boat tour of The Lost Sea. The pained look on their faces is from the flash, they were actually pretty excited! We saw lots of fish and got to touch the water as well. Our fingernails later fell off, but that's okay, they grow back.

On our way out after nearly 2 hours.

Later at home after dinner we brought back the TinkerBell cake...since there was enough to feed 6 more birthday girls and their party guests. As we like to say at the Webb house...Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

A little help from Big Brother. He was a champ through all of this Kendall, Kendall, Kendall week! However, he did ask after Kendall's real birthday dinner, "is Christmas coming tomorrowwwwwwww?" because he wanted the same gift she got from Mommy and Daddy. He quickly fell asleep and forgot all about Santa NOT coming the very next day!