Happy 7th Birthday Emily!

Emily had a Harry Potter birthday party this year. As her friends arrived they made wizard hats and wands. Daddy taught everyone how to use their wands as they made a dropper float and sink in a bottle of water. We also did a Sorting Ceremony to put everyone in their correct House.
After lunch and some playtime, we played a game with Bernie Bott's Every Flavor Beans. The Houses had to sample 10 different types of Beans and identify their flavor. Here are the Gryffindors hard at work:

While tummies settled from eating all those Beans, Emily opened her presents. She loved everything!

Her "cake":

Emily and one of her classmates share a birthday, so on the real day the two girls treated their class to a pizza party at lunch. Her button says "Birthday Girl".

That night we went out to dinner and met up with Emily's friend whose birthday is 7 days after hers.

It's hard to imagine it's been 7 years since Emily was born. She is our joy and makes us proud every day. What a wonderful person she is growing up to be.

Pooh is 7 too!

Emily is 1 year:
Age 2:

Age 3:

Age 4:

Age 7:

Special Person Day

Emily's school has a neat annual tradition called Special Person Day. Each student gets to invite someone special in their life to join them for the afternoon at school. They have cookies and punch then do an activity in their classroom. This year Emily invited Grandma Holly to be her special person.

Fun in the Snow

Since snow does not come to us, we must go to the snow each year. We decided to forgo our annual trip to Big Bear (which would have been spectacular this year BTW!) and go to the mountains on the Ventura/Kern County line with Grandma and Papa. We drove in the back way through Ojai and were a little worried that the warm weekend meant that there wouldn't be much left to play in. But our persistance paid off. We finally found a perfect spot that was hilly enough to slide on, remote enough to have no footprints until we arrived and big enough to play on for a few hours. The girls loved sliding of course. They also made snow angels, threw lots of snow balls (and "caught" a few too), made a snow man and generally had a great day. The snow sure is a lot of fun but we couldn't imagine living with it!

New Friends and Old Friends

Mommy and her friend, M, have known each other since the first day of 8th grade. In the past several years as we've both been busy starting our families, we haven't seen as much of each other as we used to. This year after exchanging Christmas letters and realizing how similar our girls' personalities are, we decided to get them all together. They all bonded as only 4,5,6 and 7 year olds can. Shy for a moment then BFFs from that point on. They tore up the playground then spent a sunny afternoon searching for rocks at the bottom of the creek.

Here She Is...

A future Miss America in our midst? Back in October, Jenna, one of our wonderful neighbor girls, asked Emily to be her "Little Sister" as she competed in a local pageant. Daddy was a bit hesitant for Emily to enter the world of Beauty, sorry, Scholarship Pageants but Emily was 110% interested. They had a Getting to Know You pizza party in November (though it wasn't really necessary for our duo)A few weeks later the Little Sisters had their first dance rehersal and an Etiquette Tea. I'm not sure if Emily took the manners lesson to heart.

Then each Saturday in January, there was another rehersal until finally it was pageant night!

The Little Sisters put big shirts over their pretty dresses to try and look like orphans as they performed to "Hard Knock Life" from Annie. (Emily is in the blue towards the left.)

Finally, they got to escort their Big Sisters off stage during the evening gown phase of the competition.

The show went on until nearly 10:00 which made Emily one tired puppy. Unfortunately, Jenna didn't win either. But it was a great experience and Emily has been recreating parts of the practice and competition around our house ever since.

San Diego Zoo

It's tradition for us to go somewhere on vacation for a few days after Christmas with my parents. That seems to have been scaled back the last few years but we did manage to get to the San Diego Zoo just after the New Year. It was a cool day but we didn't get any rain so we were satisfied.
The girls love going places with their grandparents because the usual "no" that they hear following the question "can we have (insert your favorite junk food here)?" is replaced by "Sure you can!" They loved their cotton candy.

We did see the pandas. One was too busy eating to give us a good picture, but this one seemed to be lounging for the benefit of the photographers.

The children's zoo was a lot of fun too. The girls got to pet some goats and see some smaller animals close up. Here are my little hams - the happy spider and the scared fly.