Happy Birthday, but please no singing

Tonight we had the family birthday party for my son Owen.  He will turn 14 years old on January 12.  He shares his birthday with his mom.  She kind of sees it as she shares her birthday with him.  Not really sure she enjoys sharing that day with him but either way they have the same birthday.  Because there are so many people in our extended family and people become so busy it is really difficult to find some night or weekend to celebrate birthdays in our family.  Tonight we were able to get the majority of the family here to celebrate Owen's 14th birthday.  Birthdays are pretty special and our family (the extended family of Olivers) do a pretty nice job of celebrating.  Usually we have a everyone over to someones house.   Feed them all some delicious dinner, find some sporting event on TV, open presents and then last but not least sing happy birthday.  Now let me perfectly clear here... my family can not sing.  We are terrible.  I thought I saw the dog trying to burrow his way under the couch tonight while we were singing happy birthday.  It was awful.   Pretty sure we would become famous if we could find our way into an audition on American Idol.  I can hear Randy Jackson right now, "Yo Dog you guys are... brutal."  The funny part is, we have realized how bad we are and we completely embrace our awfulness.   In fact I think we now make an extra effort to be worse then the time before.  Tonight for Owen's birthday serenade it was no different.  Remember singing Row, Row, Row your boat and having people start at different times while singing the song.  It sounded really good when you were little.  Well that is a little like our singing of the Happy Birthday song, but just imagine it with about thirteen people all starting at different times and singing off key.  Don't forget volume.  I mean each individual wants to have there inept singing ability heard so you have to sing LOUD.  It is awesome.  Awesome in a fingers on a chalk board kind of way.  Above is a picture of Uncle Marc really giving Owen a great rendition of Happy Birthday.  As you can see Owen is happy, embarrassed and if he can endure the tortures sounds of his relatives he might still have an appetite for cake and ice cream when it is all over.

Happy Birthday Owen.  Hope you had a good time at your party and congrats on surviving another Oliver family attempt at singing Happy Birthday.

Love in Christ
Scott