Happy Birthday Lillian!!

Our beautiful baby girl turned the big 1 today!!  The last year has flown by and every moment (nearly) has been wonderful.  She has such a sweet disposition and has brought so much fun and joy into our household.  I keep a journal for each of the kids and on the day Lillian was born I wrote...

"Mommy knew that I would be a little girl all along and she was so excited to see how much thick black hair I had.  For the first time ever Daddy got to cut the chord but he wasn't sure if he cared for it very much.  He thought I was just as beautiful as could be."

I can't believe that was a whole year ago.  Every day she gets more and more bright and beautiful.  She is such an incredible addition to our family.

Here are a few pictures of the birthday festivities tonight.

 She had LOTS of help opening her gifts.

Much like our older children the cake was her favorite part.

This is the face of a baby who has had her birthday gifts stolen all night.

                                                            Happy Birthday baby girl!!

And while we're on the subject of Lillian, everytime I open the fridge she frantically crawls toward the open door to try and climb inside.  Generally I catch her before she gets there, much to her disappointment.  Yesterday I cleaned the fridge out so the door was open for quite some time and she was in heaven getting into everything she's always wanted to.

She was especially excited about the open bottle of chocolate sauce that she found on the lower shelf.

Fun in the Sun

In my desperate attempt to prepare for our upcoming Utah trip I have neglected to post anything  new.  It has been crazy hot here and we have been trying our best to stay cool.  The days have been fun playing in the water and the shade outside, it's the evenings that we have been struggling with trying to keep the kids cool in their beds.

I did my best to keep the kids out of our sweltering home so we tried finger painting one afternoon.  The kids LOVE fingerpainting but I have a love-hate relationship with it.  I love watching the kids create with their hands but I hate cleaning up the mess afterwards.  Clean up was a piece of cake this time around though because I could let them do it in the sprinkler.

Lillian lives for being outside.  The second I leave her on the ground she heads directly to the dirt and stuffs handfuls of it in her mouth.  It makes me CRAZY!!!

(notice her big teeth?! She has 6 of them now.)

We had a huge hail storm that destroyed a good number of our pretty flowers so I thought I should post a few pictures of them as proof that they did exist.

Summertime Spring Cleaning

Why is it that when I make one room look like this...

Another part of the house ends up looking like this!?!?!