celebrating molly

I woke up Monday morning to the smell of something cooking. Maddie made breakfast in bed for Molly's nineteenth birthday! She even spelled her name out in cinnamon and vanilla pancakes... she's highly talented with breakfast food:

I made a birthday sign for the birthday girl:


And right after lunch, Nick and Skyler and I took Molly out for a surprise:


It was such a surprise that she couldn't see where she was going. We told her that we were going four hours away, that we had brought her passport along, that we saw sheep on the road... all sorts of things. She was quite confused.


But in reality, she wasn't going four hours away. It was a little less than an hour, to Coeur d'Alene:


We had to stop to figure out the way:


But we finally got there! A backpacked Molly was completely unaware. We walked her over to the park where she saw this (made on Sunday while she was at church, sneaky sneaky)


The party wasn't very exciting but Skyler had nineteen candles to keep himself entertained:


And we even stole her peanut butter so we could have one of her favorites - peanut butter and Oreos!


Then we went on the playground. Our first stop was the swings:


After the swinging, we played on the playground. It looked like the (Beaufort) downtown playground pre-renovation. We played Lava (it's like tag but you can't touch the ground... you can only get around on the playground equipment) and realized that we should do things like that more often. We decided it totally counted as Lifetime Fitness.


And then we walked down to the lake. We realized firsthand that it is much colder on water than land. We also realized that it would have been intelligent to have checked the weather before leaving Washington. Oops.


And Molly wanted a picture of all of us:


They had lots of metal moose all over the town. We climbed on this one for pictures:



And then she wanted more pictures... so we changed it up a little bit:


We walked around the small downtown, got gas ($2.01!), and got back on the freeway. After our adventure in Idaho, we were very tired. So tired, in fact that I fell asleep on the car ride back to our state. We concluded the evening without pictures, enjoying pizza (a Schwaninger family birthday tradition) and root beer and watching a movie. I hope Molly had a great day because I really loved celebrating it!