We celebrated Chloe's 2nd birthday today along with Mother's Day. She had a great time with the cupcakes and her presents. Here's some pictures of the afternoon:
Here's some pictures from the past year. In reverse order because that's the way blogger loaded them, and I'm too lazy to fix them all :-)
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.
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:
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:
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 :-)
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...
