Anabelle's Blues Clues Birthday Bash!

On September 15th we celebrated Anabelle's 3rd birthday with a Blues Clues themed bash. Anabelle had requested the theme a few months ago and after asking her several times I felt certain that it was what she really wanted. Finding Blues Clues (a children's cartoon popular about 10 years ago) items for the party proved to be rather difficult, it seems that it wasn't so popular any longer.  So a lot of the party decor ended up being blue, paw print, dog related, and home made. We were blessed with fantastic weather and so the party was held outside. Thanks to my Mom and Dad who helped us prepare and get ready the day of the party. And also to my friend Kylee, who took pictures for me all day- she got some really great shots. We had a lot of fun seeing all the kids play together and getting to spend some time with friends and family while celebrating our little girls birthday. I know Anabelle had a really great time, and that's the most important thing!

After seeing some pictures I was looking at online, Anabelle asked to have a tu-tu for her party. I made her tee shirt and tu-tu for the big day, and think she looks very cute!

To welcome guests we put Anabelle's chalkboard out on the driveway.

Inside the house, we had her birthday banner, and the cake-yum!  I bought the cake and cupcakes from Sams Club, and asked them to just ice them with flat white frosting. Then I bought pre-made fondant, rolled it out and used a cookie cutter to cut out shapes to decorate the cake and cupcakes. So easy and turned out pretty cute!

Each year I  choose 1 photo from each month of the birthday girl, to display. It's fun to see how much she has changed in just one year.

We kept the decor outside simple with some balloons and table center pieces. 

We tried to keep the menu full of foods that kids love; John grilled hot dogs.

Then we also had Mac & Cheese, baked beans, coleslaw, potato salad, fruit salad, lots of chips and dip, and puppy chow.

We had a few activities set up for the kids. In the cartoon there is a character that is a purple mailbox, so we had a mailbox set out for the kids to paint. 

Hard at work!

Heather, Kyle and their kids, Jacob and Danny.

The finished product!

I asked Aunt Becky if she would paint the kids faces and she was sweet enough to say yes. I am not surprised that she did a wonderful job, the kids really loved it. 

Andrew checks out Anabelle's lady bug.

Even some of the grown ups got in on the fun!

Aunt Kari, I want a mustache too!

The bubble machine was also a lot of fun!  Angela and James check it out.

Time for Pin the Tail on Blue.

Kylee and Heather; 2 ladies that I love to craft, sew, and chat with. Fortunately our kids get along great too!

Charlotte finally woke up from her nap and was ready to party.

Kylee, Tim, and their kids Kira, Lexington, and Jayden.

Kylee tries to steal Charlotte every chance she gets.

Wow! A thinking chair!

Uncle Mike, Grandpa, Aunt Becky, Grandma and Aunt Steph.

The Girls.

Aunt Kari and Uncle Joe

Sophia shows off her star.

Uncle Zac, Alex, Grandpa Mike, and Aunt Abby.

Yumm, it's cake time!

Hey Uncle Mike, what's going on over there?

Brian and his daughter Jolee

Time to open some presents

Pull me around please!

Grandma and Grandpa, thanks for all of your help!

Thanks for coming to the party, don't forget your favor. The kids each took home a pail and shovel, filled with a handy dandy notebook, stickers, a punch balloon, and some blue candy.

The grown-ups took home paw print and dog bone sugar cookies.

After resting up on Sunday, we were ready to celebrate Anabelle's actual birthday on Monday. When she woke up we decided to make chocolate chip pancakes for breakfast. She is such a good helper in the kitchen and really like to cook. Grandma came over to spend the day with us too!

After breakfast we asked Anabelle what she'd like to do for her special day? Go to the zoo, the museum, the Arboretum... What did the birthday girl choose? A trip to the mall! She loves to ride the carousel and was so excited to go to the mall and get a chance to do what ever she wanted!

Here she is buying her tokens for the carousel.

In total she rode 4 times, and loved it!

Then it was off to play in the play area.

Check out the fountain.

We took a special trip to the Disney store, which Anabelle call the Mickey Mouse store. Here she was able to pick out one thing that was going to be her birthday present from John and I. She had a hard time choosing between a Kermit doll, she loves the Muppets, and a set of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse figurines.

The figurines won, and we headed to the food court for a lunch of chicken nuggets.

In the evening John, Charlotte, Anabelle and I went to Giordano's, something we have done every year on Anabelle's birthday. This was the first year she chose chicken nuggets over pizza! ( I know what a healthy and varied diet, but we don't eat this way everyday!) 

Finally we ended the birthday celebration with an ice cream sundae.

Here is Anabelle's other birthday present, a Muppets tee shirt and Kermit skirt that I made for her. She looks adorable in them! 

Of course every birthday is bittersweet. You love to see your child grow, develop, learn new things, and show you more of their personality and what they will be like when they are older. But sometimes you just want to hold on to your little girl as long as you can, because it goes by too fast. Happy 3rd Birthday Anabelle, your Mommy loves you so much!

Charlotte is 6 months old!

Oh boy where has this summer gone? I am so behind in blogging it has become ridiculous. I am hoping to find some time to catch up soon, because I have so many pictures of our fun Summer adventures to share and since it is almost Fall I better get on it!


Even though this is now going to make my posts out of order I am going to skip ahead and post about little Miss Charlotte. She has turned 6 months old and is no longer a newborn, she is a very active baby. We went to the Dr and she weighed in at 16 lbs 2 oz which puts her in the 50%ile, her height is 24 1/2 inches which places our little shortie in the 10%ile, and her head is 42 1/2 cm which is the 50%ile. She is perfect! She has 2 bottom teeth and eats pureed bananas, peaches, apples, avocado, peas, sweet potatoes, and mashed potatoes. She also loves teething biscuits and had some pizza crust that she loved! The dr gave us the go ahead to start introducing dairy which I am hoping goes well since she has been on soy formula for the last 5 months.

Charlotte typically goes to bed around 7 or 7:30 and sleeps till around 1am, wakes up to have a bottle. She then goes back to sleep till either 5, 6 or 7 am. You never know. It is a mystery to me, if I could figure out what makes her sleep till 7- I would repeat it every day :)  She is getting better at napping, but it is very inconsistent in length. Sometimes she'll sleep 30 minutes and sometimes 2 1/2 hours, it's different every day.  I have to say that it is much harder to give her the nap environment she needs when you have another child who wants to go play and do things. If I stayed home and let her and Anabelle nap in their beds when they needed to, we would never leave the house. So Charlotte's sleep experience is different than Anabelle's was. I definitely think that her napping schedule impacts her night time sleeping schedule. That combined with her reflux issues in the beginning of her life and her tendency to get stuck in the bars of her crib have made sleep training more difficult with Charlotte. She has thankfully grown out of the getting stuck stage. The older she gets the better she is sleeping and I think that once she moves to one long nap a day, then her sleep schedule will really improve.

Charlotte is sitting up on her own, when I go in to get her out of her crib in the morning she is sitting up smiling at me. Given how strong she is we have decided to drop her mattress down so that I don't find her trying to climb out some morning :)   She has quickly shown in the last month that she is ready to start crawling.  She is easily frustrated but when she isn't tired and sees something she wants, she is very motivated to get it. She is able to drag her body around and scoot and roll and move to get to what she desires most of the time it's her big sisters toys. She doesn't quite have the crawling movement pattern down, but she can kinda army crawl. It's fun to watch her being able to make choices in what she wants to play with. She is a very happy, smiley, sweet baby. She loves to cuddle and give kisses. And by kisses I mean attempt to eat you  :)   I took her to JCPenny to get her 6 month photos and they came out so cute! I love them. She is such a beautiful little girl and I frequently have a hard time capturing it in my pictures. They did a great job of catching her adorable smiles!

Swimming Lessons

This year John and I talked about putting Anabelle in swim lessons. I asked around with the other moms for recommendations and got many answers- all of them expensive! At the age of 2 all we expected was for her to get a little exposure to swimming; things like learning to put her face in the water and just generally not be afraid of swimming. After looking at the cost we decided to wait till next summer. Then groupon came along, if you don't know what groupon is- you should. It is a "deal of the day" website that offers coupons for local companies. Groupon came out with a deal for swimming lessons at the Naperville Tennis Club, $45 for 3 weeks of swimming lessons, every day for 30 minutes and I didn't even have to get in the pool with her! Perfect for a mom with a new baby. It was a great deal, so we signed her up.

Anabelle had no prior experience swimming, in fact she had only been in a pool a handful of times. So she went into the "shrimp" group.  Overall, it was a positive experience, but probably because our expectations were low. I looked at it as a fun experience for her, and if she learned a little at the end of it- bonus. Anabelle is still young, and this was her first time taking any kind of class or lesson. I was blown away by how willingly she went with her teachers-people she didn't know. And by how willingly she jumped into the water every day. We never heard any protest, she loved every minute of her lessons and she was generally a good listener with her teachers. That being said, they didn't place very many demands on her :)  Over the 3 weeks she had many "teachers" and most of them were quite young. They were overseen by the same college age girls everyday. If we had paid more and it had not been her first year of lessons I would have been disappointed in the amount of teaching done- they could have pushed her a little more. This was also a good lesson for me in how challenging it is to get out the door and to a specified appointment every day. It was good training for when we decide to sign up for another class or preschool. 

Here are just a few (ha, ha) pics of our swimming lesson days :)  

Getting ready.

"I'm ready to swim!"

Anabelle had a lot of different teachers.

Jump!

Charlotte loved watching the swimmers in the water.

Paddle, paddle, paddle!

Putting her ears in the water.

Learning how to hang on to the wall.

Kick, kick, kick!

On Fridays all of the kids got fruit snacks for a treat, Anabelle thought this was the best thing ever!

Grandma was able to come to almost every lesson, which was a huge help!

We had to celebrate the end of lesson with a special lunch and ice cream of course!