Celebrating Emily One Year Older

Emily has been counting down the days until her birthday for weeks.  Last night we hosted a pizza/American Girl movie party for Emily's Birthday.  I guess one benefit of having my kids get older is that it is a lot easier to plan their parties.  No complicated games or activities to try and entertain the kids every second!  As the years go by I've planned less and less for parties and tried to just go with the flow.

A birthday cake with no candles or pink frosting?!

Emily chose to have a strawberry poke cake with our favorite pudding/cream frosting.  It's a little harder to decorate with, but it tastes so much better than ordinary buttercream!  We realized at the last minute that we were out of red food coloring for a pink heart so this was our spontaneous frosting creation.  Sadly, I couldn't find where I had stashed the candles, so she was a sport and blew out the imaginary candles :)

Melted Crayon Art Creations

 Becca had the great idea of making melted crayon pictures while we were waiting for the pizza to arrive.  Some streets were closed due to serious flooding from a crazy rainstorm so it took Jared a lot longer than expected to pick it up. Fortunately our basement didn't flood at all.  Our neighbors were not so lucky :(
After cake, presents and movie, the girls had a great time playing with the 24 pack of play-dough that Emily received from her friend.
This summer Emily decided to try out gymnastics.  She has loved it and it is nice for her to find something she can excel at.  It was quite humorous the other day when she showed us some of her skills and the boys tried to do the splits.  Emily makes it look so graceful and natural... the boys and I not so much!
She has always been a kind tender-hearted girl and I love finding the pictures and sweet notes that she leaves around the house.

Children's Treasures

Alyssa went on a walk to the church this morning and came home with a handful of treasures to show me.

A pile of dried worms!

Big Shoes to Fill

Joshua has a little obsession with shoes lately, just like Jacob did at his age.  Every morning he finds some shoes and hands them to me as his signal that he's ready to go outside and play.  He loves trying on everyone's shoes and its funny to hear him clomping around the kitchen with the girls high heels on.  He actually successfully escaped out the door and walked 2 houses down in Emily's silver church shoes.  Sometimes its a little crazy when he hauls off with the neighbor kid's or piano students shoes and we have to go searching through the house looking for them when they're ready to leave. 

 Today he tried on Jared's big shoes and successfully walked a few steps before he tripped and fell.  It's a good thing he's short!