Birthday Fillings and Funerals

My poor husband.

  

Yesterday was his birthday!  But I fear he didn't have a very good day because he had to spend his morning getting a filling (actually, a re-re-filling) and his evening at a funeral for a man he's never met.

Luckily, we had his party already last week (you can read about it here on Lauren's blog and see more pictures here, taken by my friend Chris).  

After he went off to work and Emily went off to school, I packed Charlotte up and we went to Common Market.  We had lunch first, to ward off any potential blood sugar related meltdowns.  

Charlotte requested water and a veggie sandwich.  I had the sandwich as well, with some mint tea.

Love this sandwich!

It's a bit unwieldy for a toddler though

She figured it out

 While we were eating our lunch, I noticed my sister-in-law go by, so I called her over and she joined us for a bit.  Then, my Mother-in-law, Father-in-law, and husband all came by too, so they had their lunch with us as well.  At least everyone but Will did.  He was still too numb to eat :-(  But it was nice to get a surprise visit with him during the day!

After lunch, we went shopping.  I stocked up on supplies for the weirdo diet I'm starting today.  I'll talk more about it later, but it requires a bit of backstory.  For once this diet is not for weight loss purposes, and here, as a sneak peek, is a shot of my cart.  Any guesses?

I don't plan to eat the toothpaste

Here's another hint.

Yum.

Will was able to run home in between work and the funeral, so I did my best to make his time at home relaxing and happy.  We ate the dinner he requested, of meatloaf and roasted vegetables with apple crisp.

The same goofy smile on every face

Then he was off again for the evening.

I think he deserves a do-over!

The rest of the weekend

After we finished the party at Pump it Up, we took the party home with us.  We invited Emily's grandparents, aunts and uncles home so they could celebrate with her in a more relaxed environment.  

Many conversations were had

Shirts matched

Much wine was consumed

Happy Birthday was sung again

More presents were opened

Sisters were jealous

New uses were found for Emily's presents

Can I just mention here that we witnessed an incredible My Little Pony miracle on Saturday?  As people asked me what Emily wanted for her birthday, I told most of them "My Little Pony stuff".  After telling the 8th person, I started to think that maybe I had better think of something else to avoid duplicate presents.  However she didn't get a single duplicate pony, and she got EXACTLY the ponies she needed to complete her collection.  I found that pretty astounding.

I know that is probably only interesting to me, but who cares, I have lots of new ponies to play with now :-)

The next day we got up bright and early and headed up to the farm for a slightly soggy Dam Day.

We found some rocks that hadn't been thrown into the creek yet

Eating melon as fast as Aunt Margaret could cut it

Emily spent almost all of her down time using her new Leapfrog Tag reader...I love this thing too and I am beyond excited that SHE'S excited about the prospect of learning to read by herself.

Then Emily and I had to leave early so we could get back to Frederick for Emily's dance pictures.

Incidentally, Emily LOVED wearing makeup, and keeps talking about how she can't wait to wear it when she's older.  Oy.

We spent the rest of Sunday making and decorating cupcakes for Emily to take to school the next day.  She had been envisioning and discussing these cupcakes for months, so they had to be perfect.  

She seemed happy enough with them, although I had a tough time getting the frosting thick enough once I had added the blueberry purée.


Monday was Emily's ACTUAL birthday, so I wanted to make sure to do some fun things she wanted to do.  We went to Toys R Us to get her birthday balloon and crown and to TRY to find some My Little Pony train cars, but they didn't have any :-(  We left with slime and a new Mommy Unicorn instead (that makes 3 now).

She also wanted to go to Chuck E. Cheese, so we stopped by for a bit (i.e. as long as I could stand) before dinner.

Charlotte just kept pumping tokens into this thing one after the other

Dinner was Common Market sushi, followed by ice cream sundaes at Emily's request, and more presents.

Birthday girl

Charlotte was pretty chill about the whole thing

Then, after 3 days of partying, we officially declared Emily a 5 year old and collapsed on the couch for a bit.

Pumpin' it up

I'm sorry I made promises I knew I could not keep.  Posting during these crazy weekends is almost impossible,  so I may just become a weekday-only blogger so that I don't feel guilty.

But this post is not going to be about me, it is going to be about Emily!

My 5 year old daughter.

0 years old

1 year old

2 years old

3 years old

4 years old

5 years old

Emily has so much of her Daddy's perfectionism and her Mommy's bossiness, and that makes things tough for a person whose job it is to basically learn and try new things all day every day.  Over the past year we've seen her make such an effort to get some of these tendencies under control, and it makes us so proud to watch our little girl becoming mature enough to stop herself mid-freakout, take a deep breath or walk away from an escalating situation and get herself back under control.  She has become much more of a person with predictable moods, someone who can accompany you on multiple errands in a row without dissolving into fits of whining (provided she is well-rested and with stable enough blood sugar)!

She is a wonderful big sister to Charlotte.  It's been so fun seeing them interact as Charlotte has "evolved into a human" (as Emily says) and as Emily has grown up to the point where she can be much more patient with Charlotte.  They fight of course, but the days when they mostly play and giggle together (and beg to sleep in the same bed at night) are becoming more and more numerous.  

Emily already has quite a head for math, or at least addition :-)  She can add single-digit numbers together pretty successfully and is starting to understand numbers between 20 and 100.  She is also a remarkable singer, if you ask me!  She has incredible pitch and rhythm and can pick up on lyrics after 1-2 listens.  And if she doesn't know the lyrics she just makes them up as she goes, as anyone who has heard her rather excellent rendition of "Libiamo ne' elieti calici" from La Traviata will tell you.

Her absolute favorite thing to do is still to play ponies.  She loves her My Little Ponies with a fiery passion, and no one had better knock them over when she has them all set up in whatever the arrangement of the day is.  She is most often found tiptoeing around with a pony clutched in each hand muttering under her breath as detailed scenes play out in her head.  She loves it when I consent to doing voices for some of her ponies, but we always have  a rough patch at the beginning while we re-establish which pony has and has not met which other ponies, who is related to who and what the initial topic of conversation will be (see bossiness, perfectionism above).  She told me recently that she wishes I could read her mind so that I could play ponies exactly the way she wants me to without her having to tell me what to say.  I told her she won't wish that for very long.

Since Emily lives in her own imagination so much, she sometimes is not terribly observant of the world around her.  This was something I attributed to her young age until Charlotte came along and started noticing EVERYTHING.  Not being very observant might end up being an issue in the long run, but so far it has actually been a good thing for Emily (from a mom's perspective) because I think it has shielded her somewhat from things that we'd just as soon keep out of her head for as long as possible.  I don't want to be that ridiculously over-protective mom, but we all have memories of catching a bit of a horror movie when we were way too young or hearing about something bad happening that really preyed on our minds because we were too young to really process the information.  There are definitely things *I* wish I didn't have etched forever into my brain!  But with Emily for example, she has never been fearful of falling asleep by herself, never had nightmares, and never been much of a worrier in general.  But you can't keep the outside world out forever, and over the past year we have started getting the "I don't want my Mommy or Daddy to die!" comments, and the "I am afraid of the basement because I feel like zombies are chasing me when I come up the stairs" and "I am afraid there will be a vampire or a ghost in my room" fears.  It's normal of course, and so far we've been pretty successful at assuaging her fears, but it's also sad for me to see the first bits of her complete childlike confidence in her safety and the goodness of the world start to fade.

And Emily is nothing if not confident.  She talks to adults and other kids alike, she always stands front and center and sings the loudest at her preschool performances and if she sees someone doing something she knows is wrong she does not hesitate to have words with them about it.  I really hope this is a trait she keeps for life, because I strongly believe if you have confidence then everything else will fall into place.  Emily has a baby book (somewhere) that I filled out (a little bit) and under the question "What attribute do you hope your baby will have?" I wrote "Confidence".  Well I don't know if my BABY had confidence, but I know my 5 year old does :-)

We love Emily so much, we love watching her experience the world, and we love getting to know her day by day as her personality continues to develop.

And I promised dragon party pictures, so here they are!

The cake turned out!

I also made these "dragon nests" for the dairy-free guests.

Tell me this girl isn't going to be a ballerina

Charlotte's "Oh my God I'm falling" face

Later I attached some moderately wing-looking appendages

Pump it Up did a really nice job!

I even tried out the slides myself

Emily opted to sit in the throne the whole time vs. joining her friends at the table

I did have a piece of cake, but was a bit disappointed at  how sweet the frosting turned out to be!

I left a bunch of it behind.

It's tough to cook (and especially bake) when you are trying to avoid sampling your product!

The rest of the weekend was similarly busy, I'll talk about all that in another post.