Bugs, Birthday & Books

Just a little peak at how much my Lindz has grown this year....check out how many inches that girl's head is now past the doorknob compared to where she was on the first day of school! Looks like her little scrawny chicken legs got some meat to them as well! lol I hadn't really noticed how much she had grown until I looked at these pictures. I knew she'd grown because of how short some of her skirts & pants had gotten, but this makes it look more real...kind of weird, but cool too.

Also, my girl loves bugs, here's one she found the other day and had to bring in to the house to show me. Its so funny how opposite the girls are sometimes. L will touch or pick up just about every bug, in fact E and I have felt the need to tell her many times not to pick up or touch spiders to try and keep her from touching one that could be bad. We don't have that worry with K however....she doesn't like bugs and has recently taken to screaming & crying when mosquitoes (which are really bad so far this year, yuck!) land on her but she won't slap them or try to get them off, she just screams almost hysterically. Isn't that like night and day? Weird.

Alrighty so Kera's birthday was a success. The kids had fun and I think the parents enjoying being able to eat and hang out together--it helps that we are all friends. She loved her cake and balloons and especially wearing her crown. The cake turned out...alright. It was quite the experience putting it together. I haven't quite decided if I will do it again. Baking it in the pan and getting it out was easy, but the whole frosting part...it was kind of a pain in the rear! I had everything all ready and realized I had neglected to read the directions all the way and so I didn't buy any black frosting gel dye stuff, which I needed for outlines and for eyelashes. I didn't want to run all the way to Michaels on the other end of town so I thought if I mixed together all the colors I'd get black. Maybe I would've but after several additions of the 4 main colors all I had was brown, so I figured it would work. I didn't want to be frosting cake til midnight! So I got to work with the brown and the actual frosting, using the bags & tips was easy but it was the changing of colors & tips back and forth that got messy and irritatingly slow. It was complicated by the girls constant need to see my progress or talk to me which was very distracting. When I finally got to the part where I was just filling in the outlines with lots of skin toned or yellow stars, my hands were getting tired and crampy from holding the icing bag. I kept thinking at the time about people who work in bakeries and how in the world they handle such tough work. So, here is my somewhat obsessed looking Tinkerbell suffering from a bad case of botox lips:

I'm not sure why its showing up sideways, the picture is actually right side up...oh well. One cool thing about making my own cake was that the frosting wasn't 2 inches thick and so it actually tasted good. :-)

Some other fun images of Kera's big ol' 4th Birthday:

The girls in the morning after Kera opened her gift from us that Lindz helped pick out....

Kera in her new crown. I had to put her hair in little pigtails so that the comb part of the crown would actually hold it in place. Her hair is so thin it wouldn't have stayed otherwise! But it worked and held it for the whole party. :-)

And finally, this is what I've titled "Kera's Birthday Face". This is how she looked every time she opened a present or saw her cake or some other exciting birthday event. It was classic! She'd be in the midst of tearing the paper and once she realized what was in the gift, she'd look up at me with this look....
She was so excited and grateful for everything that it made the day really special. She's too cute. I love her so much. :-)

Yesterday after the party E's parents took L home with them to the lake for some quality grandparent/grandchild time. So its just K around here which makes it really quiet. Me and her will head on up to the lake for a few days on Tuesday when E leaves to the sand dunes. Should be a fun trip for him and for us girls.

It seems that summer, at least for me, is the season of entertainment. I've have done more reading and more movie watching in the past couple weeks than I usually do and its been nice. Last night we watched "27 Dresses" which was refreshingly cute and entertaining. It was one of the better chick flicks I've seen in a while. I also just finished reading "The Mermaid Chair" by Sue Monk Kidd--she is the author that wrote "The Secret Life of Bees" which my now defunct book club read a couple years ago. She's a great author and although this book has some parts I don't agree with, the resolution is pretty good. It was one of those books you finish and feel good about the ending. But the book I read before that, "The Secret Lives of the Sushi Club" was excellent, probably one of my all time favorites. I found it at the Book Exchange, for some reason the cover just jumped out at me and after reading the back though it sounded good. I love it when I just find a book and without any preconceived idea of whether its good or not (usually those are from friends who've recommended a book or reviews I've heard) I get to just experience the book. And this was a good one, I highly recommend it, especially to those of us here in this area of the country--the author lived (or could still live, not sure!) in Idaho and so part of the book is placed on the Salmon River, which is pretty cool. Anyway, hopefully I will be able to continue to share with you my finds in literature as I keep reading this summer! :-)