Whoa!  Yesterday was one of the coolest birthday parties my girls have attended recently.  Brooke’s classmate was turning four and invited her to his pirate party.  Pirate party?  Yes, you read correctly!  Pirate Adventures on the Chesapeake gives an awesome pirate experience:  face-painting, dress up, sailing aboard the Sea Gypsy VI, water canon fights, and treasure hunting!  After all of these adventures, we came back for some Rocco’s pizza & birthday cake.  My kids, and me, slept very, very well.  Thanks for a wonderful party Blake & Pirate Adventure crew!

This week I’m going through all of the weekend’s portrait parties I did.  In all, I completed 6 sessions for 6 different families.  What I love about portrait parties – everyone is all in one place.  What I don’t love, EVERYONE is all in ONE PLACE!  Some kids do great in a confined area for 20 minutes, and other children need more space & time to warm up to the idea of their photo being taken.  It’s definitely a new learning curve for me.

These two girls, however, did amazing.  Anna & Kate are our sweet neighbors & friends.  Thanks for coming by girls – we enjoyed playing with you!

This photo is of my big girl Emma on her way to a sleep over birthday party.  She recently got this Princess luggage for Christmas and uses it any chance she can get!  She had a wonderful time, we were told, and slept in the longest of all the kids!  Way to sleep, Emma!

Today we trekked through 30 inches of snow for this lil’ guy’s birthday!  Well, not really.  The 30 inches ended on Saturday, so it’s probably close to about 1 to 2 feet packed down.  And Lucas just lives about 10 houses up from us.  So it wasn’t THAT bad, but I like to have one of those, “We used to walk to school with no shoes in the snow….” stories like your grandparents used to tell you.

Today was Lucas’ 3rd birthday party and luckily everyone invited lived in the neighborhood.  Lucas is a major Cars fan (the movie) so his cake was Cars, the decorations were Cars, and most of his presents were Cars.  We felt so lucky to be able to get out & walk to our dear friends’ house to celebrate with them.  Thank you Lucas for inviting us all!  Happy birthday!

Today was my husband Josh’s 30th birthday!  He’s soooooooo old!  (I’ll be 30 in 10 months).  We had a low key party for him today at home.  Emma told me she wanted to get him a “bideo game” (aka video game) so we visited Target, then GameStop & finally found Super Mario Brothers for the Wii.  We made birthday brownies, had breakfast for dinner, blew out candles & just loved on Daddy.  What we did get at Target, and what I’m calling the “bonus blunder” is a card that I accidentally let Brooke pick out.  Let me just show you the photo below:

Yup, you read it right.  I let my 2 year old child choose a card for her daddy that has profanity in it!  And I let her sign it too!  I didn’t even notice!  The kids didn’t notice, but I sure did give Josh and I a good laugh after she opened it.  Oh, well.  Just wanted to show you proof that I make mistakes too…and LOTS of them!

Photos I’ve been looking at:  Um…honestly today…none!  Sorry!  I was busy addressing all of my support letters for Ethiopia, cleaning up the house, & making a little birthday party.  I’ll look at two people tomorrow, just to make up for it!

Well, I’m off to hopefully break my 3-month losing streak at Settlers….any bets?