Happy Birthday to our baby! I guess she isn’t our baby anymore. You are a delight to us. We love your smiles and silly grins. You tell us funny stories, make up fun names for your friends, still make your wonderful excited face, and love playing with your sister. Hearing your voice this year has been wonderful. We love you!

At school Emily learned all about twisting a swing before getting onto it. Such great things we go to school to learn. She loves to put her backpack down from school and run right over to the swing. Her current complaint with our swing is that it doesn’t swing straight. She can not quite understand that it is a infant swing tied up in a tree and therefore will not preform as expected.

On Wednesday, Emily comes home early from school. This allows for a short nap for her and a joint craft or activity with Emily and Julia. This particular day they agreed to paint. They have Disney on the brain, not sure why that is, and picked out a Mickey and Minnie window art to paint. They had a blast! Just fun to remember.

We were invited to the wedding of someone we have known for years and Mama had babysat. The wedding and reception were a lot of fun and the girls enjoyed it a lot. It is hard to be with a bride in that big white dress and not captivate little girls. Our girls filled their bellies with more candy than food and then played with coloring, legos, crafts, photo-booth fun, Mad-libs (I hear Emily’s was awesome and she wrote it herself), and DANCING. There were some high school girls hanging out with the kids and they took them to the dance floor and set them loose. The girls have been making up their own line dances for weeks since the wedding. Their Daddy danced with them too before it got too rambunctious on the dance floor.

Our Friday morning playdate took us to the zoo. We were joined by our friends plus one who was out of school for the day. The weather was great and the whole trip was lots of fun. Here are some photo highlights.

"Hello little one, how about we play for the day?" She was a great sport, played in the sand, and took a nap during lunch time.

Introducing Mr. Bieber. He was awake and playing instead of his usual sleeping pose.

Mr. Giraffe was closer to the fence than usual. Actually, he was right up at the edge when we came over, but of course got shy for his photo op.

The three silly girls who just hatched from the super egg.

I like to think that Maeve is the queen of this nest.

The girls checking out the new lion exhibit fence-side.

Elena on her pretty pony.

Julia’s choice was the Red Panda. She appears excited with her choice.

Maeve’s choice was a Zebra, I wonder if her tights influenced her desire for a striped animal.

We spent a while in the sand. It seemed a fun activity and one that Thea could also enjoy.

Daddy was playing baseball with his girls after work and school one day. The girls had their turn at hitting, but decided it was Daddy’s turn. Before the photo was taken the ball had to be fetched off the roof twice. Not too bad for hitting a tiny ball thrown by little girls.