HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

I'll be changing the header soon for easter/springtime. So I thought I'd just post a quick picture of the birthday header. I'm really addicted to making headers.

SO, my darling is now 4 years old. She's such a big girl now. Awe!!! Her birthday was actually the 9th, but I am just really delayed in writing about it... So much has been happening around here.

The party was Saturday the 7th and was a 'crayon' theme. I spent HOURS making coloring/activity books for them, including coloring pictures, mazes, and even bingo. You'll see a picture somewhere in here of Erica and her cousin Joshua coloring in them.

I tried to decorate some too along the theme. I used yellow and green cups-- the crayola box colors. [Though Erica wanted plates and napkins that had colorful balloons on them, I figured Okay, Why Not.] I set her "Mr Cranny" on the table... though removed him when it was eating time. And at the Dollar Store, I had found a giant yellow crayon so I just had to get it. Then, interspersed along the table were little crayon boxes. The kids were each allowed to take one then.

You'll see my awesome cake in some of the pictures. Yes, I'm awesome! That thing was SO HARD TO MAKE!!!! I thought it looked easy enough-- haha, jokes on me. It was excruciatingly difficult and took up SO MUCH TIME. The cake book that I found the idea in suggested to refridgerate the cake between frosting, which would make it easier to put on subsequent layers. That was very true... but just added to the time. The final step was to add colored icecream cones to the top, to look like crayons sticking out of the box. Quite clever!

One thing that I put together for them-- not crayon related-- was a scavenger hunt. Well not really, since they're so young. But we put prizes out in the yard and gave them each bags to go and collect as much as they could find. They had fun doing that. Erica was a sweetheart and shared some of her prizes with her younger cousin, Peter.

Some of the prizes were punching balloons. I love those things; I got them just as much for myself as for them. HeHe :-) Do you know what I'm talking about? The balloons blow up really big and are connected to a long rubberband, and you can punch it back and forth really fast? Hopefully the picture will help exlplain it, if you don't know what I'm refering to.

OTHER RANDOM NOTES:

-I really thought about Erica's crazy behavior at dance class. The week after that one horrible night, I stayed in the waiting room to see if she'd do better without me. Well, she didn't, not at all... but at least I wasn't stressed from watching. Then this past week, she did a FANTASTIC job. I'm not really sure what the diference was. All I could think was that perhaps it was because only three other girls were there this week, instead of the normal 7 or 8.

-Erica had FOUR shots at her doctor's checkup. Poor child! And we didn't have her normal doctor this time; instead it was one of the more unfriendly doctors. He just walked in, said "Hold her and grab her hands," and then he stuck her with four needles and left. GRRRR, I was not happy with him. And of course, neither was Erica. She cried all afternoon. [Surprisingly, this was the day of her great dance class. I wasn't even going to take her, b/c she had been so upset. But she insisted on going.]

-I mentioned before about going to a sleep specialist because of always being tired. Well, that doctor set up a time for me to have a sleep study. So I went overnight to this sleep lab... but the rooms were so nice, more like hotel rooms than hospital rooms. Yeah, I was hooked up to tons of wires. My legs, arms, chest, nose, and 9 on my head! But the doctor working with me was so nice. We had lots to talk about, which was good because it took over 45 minutes to attach all the wires. That would have been long and boring if the guy had been silent. Anyway, I slept very well. Really, I did. I haven't gotten the results back yet; for each minute that you're hooked up, they record 2 pages of information. So that's a lot to look thru! But he said that somethings going on that I'm not getting enough oxygen. Aha, that would do it.

More on that later. My computer battery is about to die. Eek!!