Nora Lee's Bonfire Birthday

I was looking for inspiration. Nora Lee's birthday comes on December 29th, right after a month of other family birthdays, Christmas and New Years. We are often pooped as are the families of Nora Lee's friends. In prior years we have invited many of the people we adore and have had rather large parties (last year we had about 60 friends over).

A few weeks before it was time to decide what to do for Nora Lee's birthday this year, I stumbled upon the video from last year of Nora Lee blowing out the candles on her cupcake. She looked totally stunned. You can even hear me asking on the video, "Are you okay?" She was overwhelmed and I realized that although it's really fun to have a big party, it's intense for it to be focused on any one of us, and especially for a little one.

So this year I was looking for an alternative. One morning Nora Lee was lamenting the winter (yeah, it's so hard here in sunny California during the winter) and asking when it would be summer again. I asked her why she was longing for summer and she said, "I miss the beach, when we can go again?" This gave me an idea. I said, "You know, we could go to the beach in the winter, we could even have a fire there!" Nora Lee went crazy for this idea and that's when we came up with the idea of a winter bonfire birthday. This time we invited a lot few people and roasted hot dogs and made s'mores. Matty and Brian played beautiful music, the kids played in the sand and it was lovely.