She turned 4!

We started celebrating Ellie's birthday Monday night. She got to stay up late and help me with the cake! We decorated, and chatted, and washed some dishes together. (which may sound lame, but washing dishes is one of Ellie's favorite things to do!) She wanted us to have a sleep over in her bed, but at the last minute she changed her mind and asked if she could sleep in our room. So we made her a comfy pile of blankets on the floor and she snuggled up and went to sleep. Then all three of us got up early the next morning before the other two kids woke up. She got to snuggle on the couch with us while we drank our coffee and chatted. This was all so sweet and fun!

Sadly, we realized that we don't spend enough time with just our sweet middle child.


Later Tuesday morning we went to Gold's Gym for mommy to exercise in order to maintain her sanity. Have I mentioned how wonderful group aerobics classes are??? My mood, my patience, my confidence as a mom, my day as a whole is SO much better on the days that I exercise. I sometimes think that I'm a little crazy. And maybe I am. Some days I'm like zombie-mom....tired, grouchy, aimless, unmotivated to do anything. But I've found that on the days that I exercise, I can't stop smiling and life is full of rainbows and unicorns. So my advice to you other SAHMs, join a gym!!!

Back to Ellie's birthday...

We came home from the gym and had her first of three bday parties. We painted small wooden animal shapes with the farm kids. That took them all of three minutes so we also painted rocks. That took three more minutes so then we cleaned up and they played outside the Ed building until lunch.
At lunch we sang to her and shared the cake and cupcakes with all of our farmer friends.

After lunch the bigs watched Mary Poppins for rest time while Asha took a much needed nap.

Then we headed to the park for Ellie's next party. On the way there we found out that the park was closed that day, so we went to the next best place -Kristina's house! The camera stopped working at this point. It's done this before and I have hope that it will fix itself again too. My friend Sarah got some pictures though that I'll post soon.
The kids played outside and we moms chatted and drank Cortney's famous spiked lemonade in typical playdate style :) And of course we sang again to Ellie and ate some more cupcakes.

Then we headed to Chuys for dinner where we met our neighbors for Ellie's final 4th birthday party. I'm so glad Chuys came to Waco. Yumo!

Ellie had a great day. She was loved and celebrated. I'm so proud of her. She is a sweet, silly, confident, artistic, friendly and beautiful little girl!