What a way to turn 6!

The slumber party portion of Meredith's birthday flowed quite nicely into her birthday morning.  What a blessed girl to get to go to sleep as a 5 year old with your besties and then wake up with them as you turn 6!

Neal told me a few weeks before that he thought that it was the Dad's job to go get donuts on a slumber party morning, and I was all for him taking that job on - and the girls were very excited about it, too!

 After breakfast, the girls all stayed for a bit longer and played and had a great time!  We were very impressed by how each of them did throughout the night and morning!  Great first round of a slumber party if I do say so myself.

That's my Beans!!

When the house was left with just my two girls, we decided to do a little family present time.  

 Both girls have been super obsessed with gymnastics since the Olympics, so Jillian picked out a gymnast Barbie for her sister.

Neal and I decided we wanted to get Meredith some kind of electronic something that she could play learning games on and we ended up going with an iPod Touch - Neal was super excited to be in charge of her gift this year, he bought it and then filled it full of music and games.  

 Daddy spent some time showing her all the cool features

And then she opened the second part of her present- an iPod Touch cover that looks like a turtle - how perfect is that?

Little did we know how handy this gift would be only hours later.  Right after opening presents, I noticed some kind of purple markings on Meredith's legs.  After some research and talking to nurse friends, etc, I called the dr, who was already out for the day.  The nurse told me to just watch for it and if it got worse to go to urgent care or the ER.  Awesome.  So, I hung up, ready to watch the rash all day.  Instead, just 5 minutes later, the nurse called back after having thought through some possible explanations and decided we needed to take her to urgent care right then because of the chance of something that was fairly serious.  Even more awesome.  We hopped in the car, and my scared little birthday girl hung tight watching some movies Daddy had loaded onto her iPod.  When we got to urgent care, they saw us really quickly.  They did decide that she did not have what the nurse was fearful of, but then thought we were dealing with a blood disorder.  At this point both Hanks girls were about to lose it.  They had to do bloodwork (that was supposed to be painless, but they couldn't get her vein to cooperate, so she ended up getting poked and prodded for way too long.) and then we had to wait for over an hour for results.  Again, the games on that iPod were such a saving grace.  Meredith was incredibly worried and I wasn't much better, so having a distraction for her made it much easier on me so that I didn't have to try to talk to her and hide my concern.  The bloodwork came back good, so they let us going telling us that they thought it was just weird bruising.  I didn't buy it, but I wanted to leave and they had cleared us of everything they were going to check for, so I decided it was time for us to go celebrate this birthday girl with family dinner!  As I suspected, the purple marks were all but gone by bedtime and totally gone by the next day, confirming that it was probably not bruising.  We will probably never know what it was, and all in all, we were thrilled to know that she is just our healthy six year old Meredith Ann!