Happy 1st Birthday to Luca!



The Birthday Bear cake!  Same pan I used for Lola's 1st
Birthday but decorated different.  It turned out cute.  
Strawberry cake with buttercream frosting (some chocolate
buttercream too) 



Starting in on her smash cake

Digging in!  Notice I took off her birthday hat by this point...

Lola and her friend Julia helping Luca eat her cake

Lola got to decorate Luca's smash cake.  She was thrilled 
to help (and she got to wear her apron and bakers hat 
Matt and Sara got her) 

It's almost hirthday time!

It’s almost time for Luca’s 1st birthday next month! I can’t believe she is going to be 1. Time is really flying… I think I am going to use the same (Teddy Bear) cake pan I used for Lola’s 1st birthday, but decorate it a bit different. Otherwise we are just having family and one friend come over to celebrate with pizza and cake. I might even get a few balloons because I think both girls would love some balloons around! We are having the party the Saturday evening before Easter, which is the same day as our annual neighborhood Easter egg hunt.

Not much in other news. Ryan just got back from South Africa on Sunday evening. It was a 10 day trip. It was a looooong 10 days in our household! Long, long, long.

Cute!

Doesn't everybody wonder a little what goes on behind 'closed' doors at daycare?  I normally don't because we really, really love where we take the girls....but every so often, you know? 

This morning I dropped Luca off first, then took Lola to her room.  When I came out of Lola's room , I glanced over at Luca's room.  Corey (awesome, awesome teacher, he was one of Lola's teachers in her old room) was in Room 5 holding Luca up, facing him, and she was just grinning and laughing.  He was talking to her and making faces at her.   He didn't even see me, it was one of those 'candid' moments that made me feel soooo good about leaving them there… Every time I pick the girls up and we see Corey, Luca freaks out and gets so excited.   I know every teacher has their 'special kid', and Luca is his special kid.   :)

Babysitters

We really don’t go out much, but randomly (like this past Monday and Tuesday night) we have things to do or we can actually coordinate our schedules and have a date night. Date night lately has only been once every 3 months. That’s not good. We are going to try and make sure we go to dinner once per month. 

We just recently found 2 new babysitter options.  The babysitter we had been using since Lola was a baby (a teacher from her school) moved further away from us. She doesn’t have a car which wasn’t a big deal when it took us 5 minutes to pick her up and 5 minutes to take her home, but we tried it once she moved and it was around 40 minutes EACH way! So if you do the math it was 1.25 hours round-trip to pick up and 1.25 hours round-trip to take home. 2.5 hours out of our day when we barely have any time together as it is! We also had another gal who used to teach at the girls’ school but she is super busy and we can’t ever seem to coordinate our schedules any more. So we had to look elsewhere. Ryan’s niece babysat for us on Monday night when we had a charity event to attend. She lives in Parkville but is going to school at Penn Valley and is looking to move closer. If she does we will use her a lot! Lola really loves her. The second gal has babysat for close friends of ours, and her parents are my friend’s neighbor (follow me?). She is a pre-school teacher at UMKC’s child care facility, and she is getting her masters at UMKC. UMKC is literally a block from us, and she only lives a few miles away. Lola seemed to like her, and I liked her too. We have a 3rd (and 4th) option that I would like to utilize more – 2 girls that literally live a few houses away. They are 10 and 13. They have dance/ballet on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights so that makes it a bit more difficult to schedule them during the week, but they can’t really stay out late on weekdays anyway. We might try to use them on a weekend and see how it goes.

Good grief… I planned to blog a lot more but I’m already falling behind in 2012. At least I’m going to get another post in before the beginning of February. I’m sure only a handful of people read this blog now since I changed my privacy settings so not many people have noticed I’m sure!

This past month has been interesting. It’s almost like Lola knew she was getting ready to turn 3 and she started into her ‘terrible 3’s’ a few weeks early. She has been a bit of a handful for the past year or so now, but she seems to be testing us more and more each day. We think that transitioning rooms at school could be making it worse. She has been transitioning from the 2-3 year old room to the 3-4 year old room. She loves her teachers in the 2-3 year old room so that has been hard for her. She misses them and talks about them all the time. Fortunately she can still see them a couple times per day since they are in the room directly next to her new preschool room. I guess we will see how the next month goes.

Here are some pictures from her 3rd birthday party. We had a puppet party at a local puppet studio on the 21st, and then her friend Julia came over on the 24th which is their actual birthday. It’s still crazy to think they were both born on the same day!



Knuffle Bunny cake!  This is the second year she has requested
Knuffle on a cake.  I made the cake this year - strawberry with
strawberry cream cheese filling and buttercream frosting. 



They had an adorable birthday throne at the
Puppet Studio! 

We took 8 different pictures and we never got one where
both girls were looking at the camera! 



The puppet show!  Old McDonald's Rhyming Ranch



Everybody watching the show

Blowing out the candles

Love the bling necklace!  

Mini birthday party at our house with Lola and Julia

Cake overload! 

Yum!

Holidays and such

I’m trying to get better about blogging. I’ve also decided to make this blog private so only people I know/approve can read it. Actually, I think I am going to change the settings so that only others who blog can read it. This means there are probably only going to be a couple of people who read and I’m fine with that…I kind of want this to be more of a journal anyway, and there are a lot of times I hesitate to say things I’m thinking because I’m not sure who is reading it.

Anywho, the Christmas holiday was good! There were a few times where everybody was either on their phone (playing games) or on their computer and it irritated me. I posted one picture to Facebook on Christmas Eve (but didn’t actually check facebook), and then put my phone down for 2.5 days. Can’t we all just sit around and talk or play games instead of putting our faces in our phones and computers? Argggg. And my husband downloaded a new game on his phone which he played the whole time. And he had a cold so he wasn’t feeling great either. I can’t really talk because I was sick for our wedding and honeymoon – you obviously can’t plan sickness around holidays and events!

2012!

Happy 2012!  I hope to get better about blogging.  It wasn’t one of my New Year’s Resolutions though…I have several that I hope to stick to!   I will write more later, I just wanted to get a post in for 2012.