Lily's 6th Birthday

On June 18, my baby girl turned 6.  SIX.  She is growing up so fast!  While watching my children grow, I am constantly amazed at how fast time passes.  For Lily's birthday, we spent the whole day together.  We started off by letting her open her presents from our family...

 Then before we took off for our "day of fun" we let her see her cake.  She approved...

 Then we took off.  She wanted to go to the Memphis Botanical Gardens and look at all the pretty flowers and go to "My Big Backyard."  My Big Backyard has a LOT of fun things for kids to do.  They have lots of playhouses, a big playground, a creek/misty rain area for the kids to get all wet and cool off, they have sand pits and tunnels and balance beams and swings and hula hoops....and that is just the stuff to do in My Big Backyard.  Elsewhere in the Botanical Gardens you can feed fish and look for dinosaur bones and look at flowers and run and climb and play...basically you can see why Lily wanted to spend her birthday here!

 

 The kids had a blast there!  So when we were done there we needed to do Lily's other most favorite thing...swim!



 

 When we finished swimming we headed back to Nana and Grandad's for the party!  We didn't have a really big party this year.  It ended up just being some family and it was actually quite relaxing.  And Lily still had a great time!  We made our own pizzas for dinner...

 

(btw...the woman in the picture above is my 86 year old grandmother...you know...the one with the black hair that she never dyes....hoping for her genes...hoping) 

 And of course then we had cake and ice cream....

 And opened presents....

 

 

 It was such a fun birthday.  Lily actually said it was her "best birthday ever!"  Music to a mommy's ears!  Happy Birthday Lily!  We are SO in love with our happy, girly, active, smart, shy little princess!  You are beautiful inside and out and we are praying for many more birthdays as we watch you continue to grow into a beautiful young lady!  We love you Lily girl!!

 

Catching up.....Again...

Yes...I am still here!!  Wow have things been busy lately.  For starters, Jason went to youth camp last week...and he took our cell phone charger with him.  Well, that's what I use to download all my pictures onto here...SO I couldn't blog.  And this week has been VBS week...and well, I don't have to tell most of you how busy VBS week is!  Anyway....so last week, like I said, Jason went to youth camp.  The kids and I were originally going to take a trip to Tennessee, but we had some issues with our car that prevented us from being able to go, so for the first time ever...it was just me and the kiddos for a whole week!  I was a little nervous about it, but we ended up staying pretty busy, and we managed pretty well!  Here are a few pics from our week at home without Jason...

 It is VERY rare for my children to fall asleep in the car anymore (especially Lily).  But of course, this day, Lily and Austin both fell asleep about 3 minutes before we got to the store we needed to go in.  That was fun.

 The Monday that Jason was gone was Lily's 5th birthday!!  Since he was out of town we decided not to have her party that day.  But some sweet friends from church came by and surprised Lily for her birthday with a little play-date!  She was so surprised and it was a lot of fun.  But now that Daddy's home and VBS week is coming to a close, tomorrow is party time!

 Since Jason left on Father's Day, we decided to wait and give him his presents when he got back.  The kids made him a wooden airplane (with my help), and painted it (that they did by themselves). 

 We went back to the CARC center and swam one day.

 And this would be the outfit that Austin must wear everyday.  The shirt is almost too small, but according to him its the only shirt he has that really fits him.  And he must have the shirt tucked into the shorts and the shorts rolled up.  You've gotta love 3 year old boys who are picky about their clothes...

 Enjoying a healthy snack...berries were buy 1 get 2 free!!!

 This would be the black eye that Lily gave Austin.  She hit him with a baseball bat because he wouldn't move out of the way.  I was not in the backyard with them when this happened, so I don't know if she saw him and swung anyway, or if she didn't see him.  Either could easily be the story...

 Austin found a frog!

 My big boy and his lego creation...

So there you have it.  A few snapshots of our week.  I hope you had a great week as well.  Oh...and Wednesday began my last year in my 20's....we celebrated my 29th birthday.  It was fun and I got to eat a really ymmy lunch at Chili's...that ended with Molten Chocolate Cake.  It's not often that the person with the birthday offers that information to the waitor...unless she's pregnant and knows they give you a free dessert if it's your birthday and they sing to you...then she does.  :)  Ok, well that's all for now!  Hope you have a wonderful weekend!  VBS and Lily's birthday party pics to come soon!

Swimming

Wednesday a friend from church came over and spent the day with us.  He and his family are members at the CARC center....the local college's recreation center.  They have a huge indoor pool facility, and during the summers on Wednesdays they have "community day" where guests can go for $5 a person and then children under 18 get free lunch afterwards.  So, since they told us all about it, we decided to go!  The kids had a blast!

I'm sitting here trying to think if it's really so, but I really think this is the first time my kids have been in a swimming pool since last summer (other than Daniel swimming here with his school this past November).  Anyway...they have missed it and Lily girl even swam around in the pool!  Last year she stuck pretty close to the stairs.  And of course Austin had a ball jumping off the side and going under water.  He did have a brief pity party because he was not allowed to stand on the swimming wall in the middle of the pool.  He did NOT understand why the lifeguard was allowed to and he wasn't.  :)  And Daniel had gotten really good at swimming without water wings last summer, but since he hasn't practiced in 7 months he was a little unsure of himself.  We will have to continue working on that a lot this summer.  Anyway...enough babbling...it was a fun day, and we hope to do it again soon!  Thanks Spurrier's for the heads up!  :)