Sam's Birthday Celebrations

Sam was out of town on his birthday so when he got home the next day, Alex was about to rip open Sam's gifts for him!

My friend Ariel volunteered to babysit for us so we got to go on a date! We went and ate dinner at Saltgrass. It was good but we have horrible luck and two servers collided and dropped a tray of drinks which splashed all over my legs. Yay!

After dinner we went to the mall and picked out a new watch for Sam. The watch that he was given on his mission had died and new batteries weren't fixing it so we decided it was time for a new one. He picked out a pretty awesome one! Then we hurried to the movie theater to see a late movie. Our babysitter was amazing. She was at our house for about six hours and she fed the boys, put them to bed, cleaned the kitchen, and wouldn't let me pay her. Alex asked about Ariel the first thing the next morning.

Another night, we had friends come over for ice cream cake after dinner. It was delicious. Sam was proud of himself for blowing out all 31 candles in one attempt.

Thanks for coming Cannon family and Ariel!

I ordered a few gifts online and they arrived late, so Sam's birthday just kept going.

I got a Groupon to tour the Astros' Minute Maid Park. It was even cooler than I expected it to be. The tour was more than an hour long and we all got in for a total of $9. There were only two other families on the tour so we were able to ask questions and wander as long as we wanted.

There were so many mosquitoes. We were being bitten constantly.

It was bizarre to walk around and not have a ton of people in there. It seemed so clean!

We went into the press box and felt all official. I wanted to turn on the mic and announce things to the whole place. But I didn't have anything to say (and I didn't want kicked out).

We went into the Diamond Club and then out to the fancy seats. Sam sat down front and center and then our tour guide informed us that he was sitting in George W. Bush's reserved seat. We weren't allowed to go on the grass, so of course Edison made a break for it. The ground crew spends 10-12 hours a day working on the field.

It was crazy to see the massive jumbotron up close. It was huge. I also learned about the batter's eye which I had never heard of before.

The dugout was really torn up from the players' cleats.

Something about being on the baseball field made us do every ridiculous pose we could come up with.

I asked if we could go into the bullpen and we were allowed to since it is turf in there.

Sam's birthday was pretty awesome and I did my best to make up for not being together on his actually day. Sheesh, I love birthdays.