Third birthday party

We had a birthday 'party' at Grandma and Grandpa's again this year. Mark took LOTS of pictures, of which only a few are here. I love some of the 'sequence' shots he got of her with her cake and the flashlight. This year she knows what a 'birthday cake' and a 'birthday party' is. I told her last night she would have a birthday cake today and she was VERY excited about it. She watched me make the cake this morning (eggs - you crack!) And then she was very excited about going to see Grandma and Grandpa.






Frosting!

She blew out her candles (again and again and again! She even had Grandma in the kitchen two more times to pretend birthday candles again.) and ate some ice cream but very little of the cake. Then she got to open her presents. Grandma and Grandpa got her a Clifford collection of DVDs, which she has been watching here at home and isn't quite sure why she hasn't seen them before. They also got her a bag of BIG balloons and a Clifford book. Thank you Grandma and Grandpa :) We got her some socks, the box of blocks, a handmade shirt from Mumum (clifford pattern, she wasn't sure what to make of that either), a balloon, some little wind-up dinosaurs that were on the clearance rack and some cow things a friend at work had given to me to pass along to Esme. She was enraptured with the cow flashlight and figuring out how it worked. It moos and shines the light out of it's mouth when the switch is pushed, but sometimes can be made to moo and turn on by jiggling the mouth while it is forced open. She says the dinosaurs are 'dragons' and she likes them very much.


birthday dragons


'It goes MOO.'


How do you do that?


Grandma wearing a pair of sunglasses from Gwen

And the playhouse. She LOVES the 'box house', and has been all over the idea since she first saw it. Definitely worth a little bit of time invested in it. It was very easy to make because it is all one big box, with just some cuts made in it and painted.



'Come in, Grandma!'


She was ducking and coming back up to blow a noisemaker at us from inside the playhouse :) She also threw all her present bows out of the house at Grandma and for a while they had a bow fight.


Coralling ballooons

At Grandma's house it was a corral for balloons. At our house, it has become a corral for cats! Hmm.. kind of expected that :)


She drug the playhouse around the room, and her Daddy around the room.. and Grandma around the house. She said she had a balloon, and this was Esme's birthday PARTY, and that it was beautiful :) I'm sure she meant the balloon was beautiful but the whole day is, too :)

Happy birthday Esme, and thank you to Grandma and Grandpa for having a wonderful time again with all of us together.

LATER: She got to go for a chicken leg for supper, and a lollipop. The sunset was beautiful. We really wished we'd brought the camera for that, and to catch the picture of her asleep with her second chicken leg still in hand strapped into her carseat when we got home.