Birthday Presents

Arianna and I decided to take a picture of her with all of her birthday presents. We did this last year, and it seems like a cool way to remember everything when looking back years later. So, here you have a picture of Arianna with all of her 3rd birthday presents, including labels of who gave her what (which I'm hoping are visible enough for you to see - except you Mom...you may not even be able to see that there are words...):


She got a lot of really great stuff, and has been having lots of fun with it all! Thank you, everyone! :)

Arianna's Birthday Party #2!

Two birthday parties in one day? Sounds kinda crazy, I know. But that's what we did, and it actually worked out great. It wasn't our first plan to do it this way, but with Arianna being sick last week, and us already having planned the family party for this week, that's just how it worked out. I was afraid Arianna would get overwhelmed, but she didn't thankfully.

For this family party, there was us, Badda (my mom), Grandma and Grandpa Palmer, Aunt Jenny, Uncle Richy and Aunt Kyra, Jordan, Abigail, Nanny (my grandma), Joanne and Lesley (Joanne's mom). It wasn't a big production, especially after already having partied earlier in the day, but it was nice to all be together to celebrate Arianna's birthday.

As her gift, Joanne made a SUPER cute, delicious Cold Stone cake (she works at Cold Stone) with a Winnie the Pooh theme. She even let Arianna add the Winnie the Pooh characters wherever she wanted. :)

Arianna isn't crazy about sweets (as I mentioned in my earlier post), but she LOVES ice cream, so this was the ideal cake for her. She also LOVED the icing, we discovered; she wouldn't take her fingers off of it!

Isn't it cute? It was unbelievably yummy, too!

Arianna once again was very cute as we sang "Happy Birthday" to her. Look at that look on her face. :)

A short clip of Arianna blowing out the candles,

and everyone at the party.

Arianna eating her piece of cake, with her new little friends by her side.

Jordan enjoying his piece.

Arianna playing with the toy guitar from Grandma and Grandpa. She loves this thing, and plays with it all the time. Did I mention it plays music? Rather loudly? Thanks, Grandma and Grandpa.


Abigail, chewing on one of Arianna's bead necklaces. It was probably her favorite part of visiting us.


Arianna wearing the cat mask from Lesley. When you press the nose, it meows. Very cute! Maybe this will be part of her Halloween costume next year...

Before our visitors had left, Arianna actually came up to me and told me she wanted to take a nap. The party was cut a little short as a result, but I was very happy that instead of having a meltdown of exhaustion, she actually asked for a nap. Especially since we would be going Trick or Treating in just a couple of hours!

Arianna's Birthday Party!

This Halloween was a very busy and fun day for our family. The first excitement began the day before when Grandma and Grandpa Palmer (Jeremy's parents), Aunt Jenny (Jeremy's sister), Uncle Richy and Aunt Kyra (Jeremy's brother and his wife), Jordan and Abigail (Richy and Kyra's kids) arrived from Indiana for a weekend visit. It is always great to get together with family! This meant they were able to be here for all of our Halloween festivities, which of course added to the fun and excitement. :)

Our first adventure this Halloween was Arianna's little friend birthday party! Our original plan was to have her friend party last week, but she ended up having the flu, so we had to postpone it. This made for a very exciting, jam-packed Halloween, which ended up going beautifully smoothly overall. Five of Arianna's favorite friends (Batman a.k.a. Alonzo, Cat a.k.a. Emma, Tinkerbell a.k.a. Kaylin, Tiger a.k.a. Tayson and Pirate Pumpkin a.k.a. Jordan) came all dressed up in their Halloween costumes for the party. Arianna was excited to dress up in her butterfly costume for everyone to see. :)

The kids went on a pumpkin hunt in our backyard. Everyone found their own small pumpkin to bring inside and decorate.

Arianna and Kaylin searching.

Ready to go inside! It was a little chilly and windy out there.

Decorating pumpkins with stickers.

Tayson.

Emma and Alonzo.

Jordan.

Kaylin.

Arianna showing her finished pumpkin.

Singing "Happy Birthday". Arianna got so excited Jeremy said he thought she might start crying from joy! :)

Blowing out the candles. (All by herself this year - she's getting to be such a big girl!)

Yummy cupcakes!

Jordan devoured 2 cupcakes

while everyone else worked on their one.

Arianna ate one bite of her cupcake, then told me she didn't like it. She's never really been into sweets, so we weren't surprised. We got out some Pringles for her (one of her favorite treats), and she ate those while everyone else ate their cupcakes.

Opening presents! All of her friends were very generous, and Arianna got a lot of great gifts.

Alonzo was very cute and helpful while she opened her gifts. :)

I love her expression in this picture.

Cute little friends.

The whole gang. Aren't they a cute bunch?

At the very end of the party, after some of the kids had already left, Jeremy got out his big djembe drum, and the remaining kids had fun making some music.

Jordan, Arianna and Abigail creating some unique beats.

Jordan and Arianna drumming.

Birthday Dinner

At the end of the day, when asked what her favorite part about her birthday was, Arianna said, "Eating!". I thought she might have mentioned the piles of presents she opened, but apparently her special meal shone out even above that. After Kickboxing and Tai Chi that night, we (Jeremy, me, Arianna and Joanne) enjoyed some baked macaroni and cheese, tofu (raw for Arianna, fried for us) and steamed broccoli, some of Arianna's very favorite foods. Arianna ate a LOT; so much, in fact, that when she said her stomach was full at the end of the meal, it was SO full that she didn't even want a Pringle! That's FULL, believe me - usually her stomach still has room for Pringles. Obviously she really enjoyed her birthday dinner.

Some Halloween Celebrations

This past Tuesday was a special Halloween storytime at the library. Arianna was very excited to get dressed up in her butterfly costume! After storytime, we went around "trick-or-treating" throughout the library. Arianna really enjoyed the storytime (she always does), but didn't enjoy the trick-or-treating as much as I thought she would. I think the problem was that in the very beginning we had to walk right past the computer stations in the children's area, and she got it in her head that she wanted to play a game... Oh well. She still enjoyed herself, I think - but she was also pretty happy when we were done so she could finally go play a game!

This isn't the most flattering picture of her in her costume, but it's the only one I got... Don't you love how she's smacking her gum? She was chewing it quite obnoxiously during the whole storytime. Hopefully she'll get that under control sometime soon... She apparently takes after Grandpa Tim in her gum chewing habit. She is always asking if she can have a piece to chew, and then she chews it SO obnoxiously. I just smile because it reminds me of Dad. :)

She got this Halloween card in the mail from "Grandma" Lesley and "Grandpa" Jerry (Joanne's parents, who do special things like this for her all the time). It plays a song sung by Tigger, and she loves it! She's been proudly showing it to everyone who comes to visit. :)

Fun with hair clips

The other day Arianna came up to me and actually asked me to put some hair clips in her hair. Generally she does NOT like me doing anything to her hair, so this was very unusual. She continued asking me to put more in until there were 8 in her hair altogether. It actually looked kinda cute, I thought, and she was in a cute mood to boot, so I took some pictures... :)

Family Photo Shoot - May '09

We decided it was time to try our hand at using the timer on my camera to get a family picture. Other people do this all the time, right?? Well, let me just say, it wasn't near as easy as they make it look in the movies! The whole affair lasted like 2 hours, and I had a pounding headache by the time we were done. This picture, our final product after those 2 hours, was the first picture we got where Arianna was smiling and not in the process of throwing herself off our laps. When we looked at it and saw she was smiling, we were like, "Okay, that's it, we're done!", because there was no way we were going to spend any longer in our attempts. I think it's a pretty good picture myself...

After finally succeeding in getting a frameable, semi-traditional type family portrait, we decided we could have a little fun...

Oh yeah, and during our "traditional" shots, we did get a couple of other decent ones that weren't of the whole family...

Then it was Maya's turn! She did really well, though I discovered first-hand how difficult it can be to take pictures of a deaf dog.

Isn't she a sweetie, though? :)