Claire celebrated her 6th birthday today with about 20 friends at Jumpoline Park.  According to their website, “Jumpoline Park is for everyone who is seeking excitement and entertainment while exercising.”  It was actually a lot more fun than they make it sound!  Who cares about exercise?  These kids just love to run and jump!  Basically, this place is one gigantic trampoline, or at least a bunch of big trampolines spliced together.  It is hard to describe, so some pictures will have to suffice.

It doesn’t look like much from the outside…

But there is lots of fun to be had on the inside.

Here’s Claire with Coco, Zoe, and Hannah. Almost every picture from the party was a blur.

Cupcake time. The monkey theme came from Claire’s kindergarten class mascot.

Oddly enough, Claire’s Uncle Tim, who lives in Washington DC, recommend Jumpoline Park to us.  He said some friends of his had visited Austin and discovered this crazy giant trampoline place.  So we went to check it out and quickly estimated that it would be perfect for Claire’s birthday party.

We invited all of Claire’s kindergarten class plus a few “old” friends from preschool and the like.  I think we’re getting pretty good at these big kid’s parties now, at least when we can rent out a facility like this.  I have heard “horror stories” about hosting a party at your own home, with 20 kids running around tearing the place apart.  But this party went really well and was not too tough to pull off, even right on the heals of Thanksgiving (as always!).

Grammy helped with the preparations and was on duty as the official Molly watcher at the party.  She spent most of the party protecting Molly from bigger kids in the little bounce-house obstacle course.  Without Grammy, I am pretty sure we would have lost track of Molly, as in “Where is she?  Oh no, I thought you had her…”

There is not much more to report, but I do like to make a note of some presents since it might be interesting later.  Claire is opening two presents a day, and so far she has made out with…

• A fresh influx of pink, girly Legos from Noni
• A super-cute Lalaloopsy doll from Grammy
• A Hello Kitty water dispenser
• An indoor “princess castle” play tent 
• Decorate-your-own frame and bracelet sets