Chloe's Birthday Slideshow revisited

Since Chloe's 2nd birthday is Friday, I thought I would re-post her slide show. I'll also put up pictures from this year in another post.

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Tea Party

Sunday afternoon Claire, Emilie, and I went to the Garden Tea Party fundraiser for Lydia's House. Lydia's House is a charity that provides help for battered women and their children. They do an amazing job and we were really glad to support them even in this small way. Their Tea Party was so much fun. They had children's activities for the first hour and a half that included balloon animals, a duck pond, cookie decorating, a photographer, clay pot painting and flowers. Then they had a raffle and silent auction (some items were for women, some for kids). Then we had lunch and tea while they announced all the winners. It was fun to see all the little girls and moms/grandmas all dressed up. Claire and Emilie had a ball with each and every activity. Here's some pictures:

Claire and her giant flower

Emilie and her monkey

Waiting for our lunch (and yes, Emilie fell down Friday and scraped her face. She's definitely hit the age where she continuously has something scraped or her clothes ripped :-P)

Claire ready for lunch.

Cookie decorating. You can also see the pots they painted and planted flowers in at the bottom of the picture.

Mother's Day Lunch

Yesterday was the annual Mother's Day Lunch at preschool. This was my first year to go with Elise. She was soo incredibly excited! The children sing a couple of songs, recite a couple of poems, and then get to serve the moms lunch. They also have decorated placemats for us, painted a flower pot and planted a flower in it, and done a questionnaire about their mom (with their teacher's help!). This is the first year that all my questions were sweet (instead of some being embarrassing!). For example, one child put that his mom was the best at cleaning toilets :-) According to Elise, I am the best at giving hugs. Anyway, here's a few pictures from our lunch:

Her flowerpot

Elise with all of the things she made for me.

Reciting a poem

Walking in with her class

Spring!!

The weather this weekend was wonderful! We were outside all day Saturday. We started with a trip to the nursery. The kids loved looking at all the plants, the ponds and other outdoor stuff. When we got home we planted a ton of flowers, a bush, and a tree. Here's Chloe posing with some of our work after she helped water on Sunday. (She wasn't anywhere near this clean on Saturday!) She was very curious and asked a lot of "What's that?" questions while we worked. So cute :-)

Thank goodness they're washable...

Let me start this by saying that Chloe LOVES to color... wait, let me change that to, I swear I was only out of the kitchen for a minute... nevermind, here's the story:

Thursday afternoon I took a load of laundry upstairs. Now I do laundry on an almost continual basis with 4 young children so this is nothing new. I was going to hang up the shirts and leave the rest of it on the floor of Eric's and my bedroom to fold later. Then I was coming back downstairs to put some chicken in the oven for dinner.

So I'm in Claire and Emilie's room hanging up shirts when Emilie runs in breathless, "Mom, you're not going to believe what Chloe just did." (Chloe and the other girls were happily watching the Smurfs on Boomerang just moments earlier. Our satellite dish had been broken for the past week. The repairman had fixed it just that afternoon so they were thrilled!) Anyway, Chloe came up the stairs like this:





She also colored the bottom of her feet and the floor in the kitchen. Thank goodness she used the washable markers that one of her sisters so helpfully left on the table for her coloring needs. She just couldn't resist. (For anyone reading with small children, baby wipes wash off washable markers pretty easily.) Chloe was so pleased with herself that I had to take a picture before we cleaned up. Then I put the markers up high in a drawer...

Happy Easter!

We had a great Easter! Yesterday we went to Elise's preschool's egg hunt which was a lot of fun. Then we headed over to Eric's parents' house for our niece, Liah's 5th birthday party. The girls loved playing with their cousins, and it was nice to be outside in the great weather.

This morning, the girls loved their Easter baskets and were incredibly excited! We then headed to church. Getting dressed up was so much fun, and they got tons of compliments on their dresses. Even more impressive was that despite church being incredibly crowded (Eric and I each had a girl on our lap just so we could squeeze into a pew!), the girls were really well behaved during church. Usually they just go to Sunday School, so I wasn't expecting much since they all had to be with us during the service this morning. What a nice surprise :-) After that we headed to my parents for lunch, an egg hunt, and more baskets of goodies. They are still coming down from the sugar... Anyway, here are a few pictures:

Claire took this picture of Eric and I. A little out of focus, but not too bad.

The girls all dressed up and ready for church with their new purses from the Easter bunny.

The bunny brought everyone new shades

Claire showing off her new swimsuit. She loves orange.

Elise's sunglasses

Yeah for Play Doh!

Checking out their loot.

Getting ready for Easter

We spent Saturday doing some of our family's traditional get ready for Easter stuff. We started the morning with a visit to Purina Farm's Easter Village to pet the baby animals and check out the big ones. We came home and dyed Easter eggs and the kids worked on Peeps art projects with my mom. The kids had a blast and then moved back outside for a driveway party at my neighbor's house. Here's some pics from our day:

Elise's "Goldilocks and the 3 Peeps"

Emilie's "Ra-peep-zl"

Claire's "Statue of Peeps"

Emilie swears someone was pinching her... maybe the bunny?