My Birthday, Ribfest, and Heart!

July 2nd was quite a day around here. It included the birthday traditions of presents and cake. The girls gave me a big, warm and soft beach towel for taking to the pool along with some new summer shorts. We also had a decadent never-ending, four-layer chocolate cake from Costco. When we bought it, a lady commented that, "no matter how much of the cake you eat, it just keeps growing back," which is so true. We told Katey it was up to her to help us finish the cake and that we weren't letting her go back to Utah until it was gone. Unfortunately, she leaves tomorrow and there is still cake left---I think I'll throw it in the garbage and let her off the hook!

In what has become a family/birthday tradition we headed over to Naperville's Ribfest in the afternoon. This year was different from previous years for three great reasons: 1)my sister Katey was with us, 2)the weather was perfect, 75 degrees instead of 100 degrees, and 3)we stayed for the evening concert.

We started out by letting the girls ride the carnival rides. My kids love rides, no fear for them. After the rides, the girls got in line for the Eurobungee. It is basically a contraption that allows you to jump on a trampoline while hanging from bungee cords. The line is long and slow but the girls really wanted to do it and patiently waited in line. While they were lined-up and under Dave's supervision, Katey and I scoped out all the rib vendors and their trophies. After the girls finished jumping we found a nice place to sit to watch the concert that evening and ate some ribs from a team called Pigfoot which was accompanied with a platter of fried delights including a blooming onion, battered mushrooms, broccoli, and cauliflower---at least we had veggies!

After dinner, we just hung out under the blue sky waiting for the concert to start. The girls played on a few kid attractions and had snowcones. Then as evening descended, the headlining band appeared on stage, singing Barracuda! That's right we saw HEART in concert! They were awesome and performed songs like Alone, Never, and Crazy on You. Ann Wilson's voice is amazing, she is a powerhouse.

HEART ROCKS!

Everyone enjoyed themselves, the girls were so cute and even sang along to some of the songs they knew. Yes, they knew some of the songs, courtesy of their dad and Guitar Hero. I think Dave was pretty happy that the girls' first concert was a real rock band instead of something like Miley Cyrus. Paige rocked out by dancing along with the music. Dave took video with his phone, but the quality is not that good and it is sideways. I have been working on it for a while but I can't edit the video so here is the rough cut if you are interested.