Grace's Family Party

We had Grace's family birthday party on the Saturday after her birthday. Mom, Dad, Joni, and Julie and all of the kids came. Unfortunately, Eric's parents couldn't make it. Grace and Lyla were sad about that. The kids had fun being crazy and playing. They started "dancing" and being silly. I got some silly pictures of that. Reesi is a wild woman! Little Easton was a hoot too. He really likes his Lyla. She is good at playing with him and paying attention to him. Grace got a real diaper bag with real baby stuff in it from Mimi and Papoo. She asked for that to play with her baby doll. Julie gave her a new canopy baby doll bed. Joni gave her a bunch of hair accessories. She wears them just about every day. She also got a couple of books but I missed who they were from. She had a Rapunzel cake and we bought Subway sandwiches for dinner. That is what she wanted. She loves Subway. So, it was a good evening. My little girl is getting so big and I don't want to accept that she's really 9 years old! I'll do a post soon about what Grace is like at this age.

Grace's real birthday

Grace's real birthday was on a Tuesday this year. She wanted to open her presented first thing int he morning. She got some flip flop house shoes, a new lunch bag and a Rapunzel doll from the movie Tangled. Eric, Mimi, Elye and myself went to the school that day for lunch. We brought a big cookie cake to share with her friends. That what she has had at school for her birthday every year since kindergarten. Every year I think she will want something different, but not so far. The cookie is dangerously good though! That evening at home we went to Subway for dinner, her favorite place, and let her blow out some candles too. I think she had a pretty good birthday regardless of having to go to school and do homework.

Ben Franklin

Grace presented her first book report today. She did a great job preparing and gathering facts all by herself. I wa very proud!

Caught!

Under the bed with a ring pop!

Jingle Bell

Jingle Bell is now 4lbs. 9oz. She is full of energy and loves to bite!!! That is her form of play right now. We'll all be glad when she grows out of that or learns to not bite so hard. She literally will run behind you and bite your heels! She has also made my nose bleed twice by biting it! Yes, I know, I need to keep her out of my face. The potty training is catching on as long as we're downstairs. When we go upstairs she doesn't bother to make the trip down to get to the yard! She loves to eat rabbit poop! Yuck! It totally grosses me out. For some reason, we now have a rabbit using our backyard as a bathroom that has never done that before. The vet says to just try and keep it scooped up but it won't really hurt her. She likes to dig in the dirt in the backyard too. Her white fur gets dirty very fast these days. She is a cutie and so fluffy but is a little stinker right now. I'm looking into training classes!

Grace is a 9 year old Rock Star!!!

I really wanted to not have to have a party at our house. It's a lot of work and clean up on my part. But, Grace wanted a party and the parties on location are just so expensive. So, Aunt Joni came up with the idea for a Rock Star party. Grace loved it! They made signs for every room, like "Green Room" for the kitchen, "Dressing Room" for her bedroom, "Make-up Room" for the bathroom, "Recording Room" for the stage area, etc. They made a big "Girls Rock" sign for the stage and "Rock Concert Tonight" sign for the front door. We decorated with foil streamers, balloons, gold stars and even a couple disco balls that I borrowed. We had a red carpet coming up to the front door and Reesi's new karaoke machine that Santa brought this year. Joni provided the fun music. We ordered pizza and I made cupcakes in a cone that looked like (or were supposed to) microphones. I froze strawberry Fanta in ice cube trays to drop in the Sprite for something special to drink. They all dressed like Rock Stars and put make-up on, glow in the dark nail polish and Rock Star tattoos. They danced and sang and ran all over the place all night long! We had two separate sessions of walking the red carpet. Joni played the part of announce with her echo microphone and announced each girl on the carpet. I played the part of paparazzi and snapped pictures. I kept watching the neighbors windows to see if they were looking out to see what was going on. The girls were really wild and really loud! We started the movie "High School Musical" around 9:45pm to try and calm them down. It didn't work exactly as I had planned but a few did sit and watch it. We have 4 girls spend the night. I finally sat on the floor and kept them quiet until they fell asleep around 12:30am. They had a blast. I was exhausted and spent a LONG time cleaning up the next day. Poor Jingle Bell was played with the entire night and next morning but she was a trooper and didn't get mad and bite anyone, thank goodness. She slept on the couch the next day from about 10am to 1:30pm when I had to put her in her crate because we were going somewhere.

This little notebook was a gift from that night. Grace wrote a diary entry in it the next day. This makes all the effort and work worth it. I'm so glad she had a good party!

Sleepover

A couple of weeks ago I got a text on Thursday morning asking if Grace wanted to spend the night with a friend on Friday. Before I could get an answer back to her another mom texted asking if Grace would spend the night with them. They are all friends with each other so I invited them both over to spend the night at our house rather than choose one friend over the other. So, the impromptu sleepover started on Friday afternoon. They were all very excited. They had pizza and breadsticks for dinner but then decided they wanted to have a tea party. We did a tea party birthday for Grace when she turned 6 years old so I have a bunch of tea cups and tea pots and things perfect for a tea party. They didn't care for the tea though so they ended up drinking sprite from the tea cups. The next morning they had another "tea party" with pancakes and OJ for breakfast. They had a great time.