Celebrating Tierney’s birthday in style

Since we knew a long time ago that Matt was going to be gone for Tierney’s birthday, we floated the idea with her that instead of a birthday party (which is what everyone else seems to do) would she be interested in staying in a hotel for her birthday night.  She readily agreed as long as it had a pool and a television (in the room…she was very specific).  So after some research we decided to go to the new fancy Mt. Meru Hotel in town.  We even convinced Joey, Birch, and Cole to be our partners in crime. Despite the chilliest two days in months and also some rain, I think it was a success.  We swam, ate pizza and cake (that we brought from home..decorated my Mama Jackie), and watched tv in our room.  We really did splurge and got a junior suite, so the kids were on a pull out couch in the living room and I was in a separate room in a queen bed (with my own tv!). The kids haven’t seen a tv in a year, so when we turned it on the first show we saw was a Discovery channel show about helicopters.  They didn’t want to even look further and were totally happy learning about Apache helicopters for the next 30 minutes or so.  As an added bonus there was free wireless internet, so we came prepared with laptops to download as much as we could while we were there (still not super fast, but we didn’t have to deal with the 150MB daily limit we have at home).

Pool time

 

Presents and cake

View from our room of Mt. Meru

We stayed until the last possible minute and then went to a friends house for lunch.  We were all going to go to a free music/dance concert put on by the students of a local college (Tumaini University of Makumira University College) and it seemed silly to drive home to only head back out again, so I basically invited us over to their house.  The kids had a great time playing with all of Millie’s “baby” toys (she’s almost 2) and I enjoyed Roger playing with the kids while I sat and chatted with Rebecca.  It was a great way to end the weekend and probably would have been even better if the kids weren’t sleep deprived going in to it.  Their favorites from the performance were the African drumming and dancing.  I think they could have skipped the classical piano and jazz trumpet portions. 

All in all it was a great weekend and all the kids want to know when we can go back to the Mt. Meru.  Anderson says he wants to do that for his birthday, but Ashlyn was kind enough to remind him that he’s going to forget by then anyway.