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.