Playing Catch-up

Our baby girl turned 5 years old on May 1st. For her Birthday party, we had a good old fashioned bbq at our house and let her invite "family friends." Thank goodness the rain held out, but it was still a bit cool. One of my young women has started decorating cakes and she sweetly made this butterfly cake in a garden of flowers. Ellie adored it. She refused to blow out the candles with everyone watching until Emma helped her.

Big sis - Emma the monkey in the tree helping get the Princess pinata all ready. This was our first pull string pinata experience and it was so nice not having to worry about somebody getting accidentally whacked with a bat.
Here's the Birthday girl 2 days later on her actual Birthday May 1st opening her 3 presents from us. She loves to save her money and wanted a real "piggy" bank. As you can tell from the look on her face, she loved it. Little did we know at that time how our lives would drastically change just a few hours later when we learned of my Father-in-laws passing.
This is after the kids and I were back from the funeral in Arizona and we needed to take cookies to a team soccer party. I was exhausted so Emma took over. She's becoming quite the little helper.

This is Brady getting the "Ray Allen" from the Boston Celtics award for his excellence in academics this year. He makes the funniest faces. I'm pretty sure he was proud and embarrassed all at once. Anyway, his teacher was exceptional this year. She went above and beyond in everything...and not just for her students but for their families as well.

Yesterday I took the kids strawberry picking at a local farm with 2 reasons in mind. 1.) to get them out of the house and 2.) I thought the bending over would put me into labor, but it didn't. However, we did get 2 strawberry pies and 6 lbs. out of the outing all for a mere $7.

After the strawberry fields, we dropped Ellie off at Safety Town and I met up with a friend and her kids at Chili's for lunch. It was free yesterday for all kids 12 and under and well I couldn't pass up free. We purposely had the hostess seat the kids at their own table so we could still gab and feel like we were out without kids. :)