The girl with the third birthday is safely asleep in bed now. I hope she had a good birthday. It seemed like a lot of fun.

I got home from work around 5:30 and we got the family into the car and headed to Wingers for dinner. I had the Pastrami Burger and Christine had the Blackened Chicken Alfredo. Maya had the kid's meal of wings with extra celery to the side. She loves celery.

After we ate dinner, we let Maya open her gifts. She got four new outfits for the upcoming cooler weather, a whole bunch of ponytail elastics, a Cooties game, and a little dress-up doll.

After dinner, we went to Fred Meyer with a large plastic bowl full of pennies we'd collected over the last few years. We put them into a Coinstar machine and got cash credit. We had over three thousand pennies in that bowl! Coinstar, of course, takes a 8.9% cut, and we got $27.54 for our pennies. Maya thought that was fun. Too bad it'll take a while to save up another three thousand pennies.

Then we went bowling. Christine and I thought about it afterwards and determined it has been over six years since we'd been bowling. The last time we went bowling was when we were living in Salt Lake City and we went with our friends Ken and Wendy (who now live in Washington where Ken works at Microsoft and we don't talk to them anymore because they might as well work for the devil, right?)

The bowling game was a lot of fun. Maya was funny because she kept picking up her ball and walking over to either one of the lanes adjacent to ours. We had to steer her straight up to our lane.

Christine was doing better than me for the first part of the game, but then on the eighth or ninth frame, I got warmed up and scored a couple of strikes and ended up winning the game by a slim margin.