LO's 5th Birthday: Part 3

Look out, folks! It's another photoriffic post! :)

The morning of LO's 5th birthday began with... birthday pancakes!!! Not the greatest looking "5" but seriously, have you ever tried to flip a pancake in the shape of a 5? It took me two spatulas and a lot of hand-eye coordination! ;)

LO was super happy about her birthday pancake... Here she is making another birthday wish!

We had her birthday dinner at Red Robin, complete with singing, a hot fudge sundae and a balloon! When we got home after church that night, we did have a little ice cream cake with a candle and sang "Happy Birthday"to our girl, led by Chase!

The plan was to continue her "birthday week" with a trip to the beach today (Friday). Unfortunately, it was gonna have a heat index of 105° F, so we opted to scrap the beach plans and come up with a new strategy for our family day o' fun!

We started the morning with a special treat: breakfast at IHOP! We very rarely eat there, but I knew LO loved their silly pancakes, so we headed that way for a super yummy breakfast!

After breakfast we headed to a nearby fun park for a ride around the track on the go carts! It was Chase's first time and he loved it!!

See??

Seriously. Loved. It.

:)

We went inside for some arcade fun, too!

Believe it or not, this is LO bowling... ;)

Told ya!

Chase's turn!!

Giddy up!!!

One of mommy's favorites...

After the fun park/arcade, it was time to head to the pool with family! It was crazy hot, but the pool was refreshing enough.

After the pool, our day o' fun continued at the movie theatre to see Ice Age: Continental Drift. We had a great time and all enjoyed the movie!

You know you were successful in having an awesome, fun-filled day when your kids look like this at 6 o'clock in the afternoon!

We had a great day enjoying time together as a family. I think it was much better than 7 roundtrip hours in the car to sit on the beach in 105 degree heat! And although LO was slightly disappointed when we told her we weren't going to the beach after all, I think she managed to have a decent day anyway. ;)

LO's 5th Birthday: Part 2

Today's post about LO's 5th birthday party will be very photoriffic! Enjoy!!

The night before her party, we went to get her very first spa pedicure! Not surprisingly, she loved it, just like mommy!

Pretty toes, complete with a flower on her big toes! :)

On her actual party day, I made little welcome sign for the party on the front door:

Party favors! Ones for the girls and ones for the boys. I also included a little stuffed unicorn and stuffed horse for our littlest party guests who were under 1.

I tried to avoid too much candy in the party favors, so I used stickers, a magnet craft, a bracelet craft, a not too annoying noisemaker, a light up ring, and a striped candy stick. I did throw in one of my super sugary marshmallow creations, which sort of put the candy quota over the top. Ooops!

The boy favors were very similar, only there was no light up ring and more masculine stickers and crafts!

The yummy white chocolate-dipped, sprinkle-laiden jumbo marshmallows!

The birthday banner that I'm actually quite proud of! This was a lot of cutting shapes out by hand! The cool thing is I plan to reuse it for her future birthdays... just replacing the unicorns with other party-themed pics. :)

I somehow managed to overlook taking the obligatory food pictures, which sucked because I made a killer fruit tray complete with the fruit dip inside a hollowed out pineapple! It was beautiful and tasty! I also included a veggie tray, chips with homemade salsa and pretzels. It was just some light snacky food since the party was after lunchtime.

During/after snacks, I let LO open her gifts. She was super excited to get a rainbow unicorn Dream Lite! Thanks, Aunt D!

Here she is opening the game Twister -- which I thought would be a lot of crazy family fun with hubs and I and the kids. My niece thought it was pretty funny, too! :)

More gift opening...

I have no idea what led to this face...

Girl likes her some Tangled stuff!

Gramma and her mad wrapping skills... it took the whole team to get this one open!

A Barbie unicorn! Score!

LO reading the name of the new book mommy & daddy gave her.

Here she is looking through the book she made without realizing she made it! I'll write a separate post about this one because I think it is such an awesome gift/keepsake!

One of her most favorite gifts... a bench from Gramma & PaPa! She loves it (as does her brother)!

After gifts it was cake time! This wasn't my best work ever, but I managed to get over it. It tasted good and that's what mattered most. ;)

Time to sing!

My big girl!!!

Make a wish!

Mmmmmm! Cake!

After cake and ice cream, we headed outside for one of LO's birthday requests... a piñata! I didn't think about it beforehand, but I sure felt sorry for that sweet little unicorn who was getting the life beat out of her. Those big, innocent eyes... ((sigh))

LO was up first:

Chase gave it a go, too!

More party guests taking turns beating the crap out of a unicorn!

She's at it again! I think all the kids got at least 3-4 chances before we had to give up and make hubs rip it open!

Thanks to hubs, the party could finally continue! The funny part was that the candy inside the piñata was beaten to a powdery mess while Mrs. Unicorn barely had a scratch on her!

Following the piñata, it was POOL TIME!!! Unfortunately I wasn't able to get a single picture at the pool... :( I was busy doing my hostess duties but from what I could see, everyone had a lot of fun!

So tomorrow is LO's actual birthday... the weeklong festivities shall continue! :)

LO's 5th Birthday: Part 1

OMG. I'm so sorry I've been MIA for so long! It's been crazy busy 'round here lately! One main reason for this just might be LO's 5th birthday! We held her party here at the house last Saturday and it was a smashing success! She had a wonderful day and of course that was all that mattered to me!

I'll probably do a short series of posts about her big party and her big day (which isn't actually until Wednesday), because I'm really excited about some of the craftiness I busted out for the decor. But for now I'll just share her sweet little invitation...

I really loved the way the invitations turned out. And I let LO address each of the envelopes herself, which she was crazy stoked about! Well, actually I just let her write the names on the envelopes and I wrote in the addresses, but it was still fun for us both. :)

I'll share more soon once I get around to downloading the bazillion pics from my DSLR! :)

Story Time with LO

Geez! I can't believe it's been so long since my last post! Sorry, folks! Things got kinda crazy 'round these parts with some (full-time) training at work last week as well as the preparations for LO's 5th birthday party (eeeeek!) this weekend. I promise I'll share some posts about the birthday planning because, let's face it, that stuff is So. Much. Fun.

But for now, I'm gonna leave you with LO reading a little bedtime story, Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. She tore through this book in under 2 minutes so it's obviously not the longest video, so we'll have to try one of her usual books (a bit more "wordy)" for our next installment. ;)

 

Bad Mommy!

WARNING: This post contains graphic images. Well, they're graphic if you're like me and you don't like to see grody skin conditions. Proceed at your own risk.

So a few weeks ago, LO complained about soreness in her thumb. I didn't think much of it the first time she mentioned it, but when she told me again a day or so later, I took a closer look. This is what I found:

June 20, 2012

Gross, right? It looked almost like a burn or something. I asked her how it happened, if she hurt it somehow and she said she didn't know what happened.

For the past 2 weeks, we've just cleaned it out with peroxide, treated it with Neosporin and slapped a band-aid on it.

Fast-forward to yesterday. OMG. I asked to look at her thumb and totally gagged when I saw it. And of course I immediately felt awful that it looked so bad. Eeeew:

July 5, 2012

I asked her if it hurt at all and she (surprisingly) said no, so that made me feel a little bit better. I called her pediatrician and made an appointment for that afternoon.

Ugh. The doctor diagnosed her with paronychia, which sounds really bad but it is essentially a skin infection that occurs around the nails. She put her on a hefty antibiotic for 10 days, which should help to decrease the swelling and redness, as well as eliminate any kind of "oozing" from the nail. The doctor also mentioned: SHE WILL PROBABLY LOSE HER FINGERNAIL. I gasped like a crazy person who was just told her daughter will lose her THUMB. I just figured you only get one, and if it's gone, it's gone!! But alas, the doctor calmed my fears by telling me it WOULD grow back. But OMG! I can't believe I waited until my daughter got into the "she-might-lose-her-nuggin'-fingernail" phase of an illness/infection before mommy finally did something about it. I'm so mad at myself!!!!!

I know all of this is temporary, and she's not in pain so that helps, but still. What kind of mommy am I??

My poor, sweet LO.

Sibling Love

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July! We had a really low-key day at home that included pool time, some delicious grilled chicken, a view of all of the fireworks within a 30 mile radius and s'mores! The kids had a wonderful time watching the fireworks from our own backyard and playing with sparklers and the s'mores were a fun and unexpected treat for the kids (and yes, hubs & I had one, too!).

I happened to catch this little gem of a video of the two kids playing (mostly nicely) together and thought I'd share. It's mostly LO reading "The Lion King" to Chase, but there is also some fun and play (and a sweet kiss!) involved as well.

My little sweeties! LOVE!