Yay! Grandma’s feeling better!

My mom is not 100% in love with this photo because I was sitting on the ground looking up at them when I took it.  Many of us can sympathize that this is not always the best angle, but I love it!  Grandma had surgery right after our party weekend and is beginning to feel better.  She has had a tough year, but it looks like things should be getting easier for her in the next few weeks.  She’s much stronger than she knows and I’m really relieved to hear her sounding closer to her old self on the phone these days!!

Here are a few other crapload of pictures to finish up Halloween weekend fun…

 

 

PS-Chloe went with me to vote again this year.  They gave her a sticker, too, and our candidate won the big race!  The local results were discouraging as always, but we’ll keep trying!!!  I forgot to take a picture of Chloe with her sticker until after she fell asleep.  This picture was taken with the lights off in the room and the nighttime setting on my camera.  I’m pretty impressed with the colors, but that is why Chloe looks like she’s scowling a little bit.  Can’t wait to see how things go for the next four years.  Hooray for the USA–good decision, FINALLY!!!

Happy Halloween!

Ok, so as always I’m slow on this one, but the weekend was so great I couldn’t skip over it.  We are going to spend as many Halloweens as possible doing exactly what we did this year because we just had that much fun.  My sister and her family came from Minnesota and we had a birthday party for Chloe and her three cousins mixed together with a Halloween party and trick-or-treating.  The weather was nothing short of incredible.  More than 100 kids and families stopped by my parents house and Chloe totally loved meeting everyone.  We wanted to visit about 4-5 houses of our neighbors, but Chloe followed my 3-year-old nephew up to every porch on the block and took treats out of the bowls and said Thank You to everyone.  I didn’t even have to go with her, she let Uncle Matty teach her how to do that.  Everything turned out as great as you could expect when you’re celebrating birthdays for one one-, two two-, and one three-year-olds!  Instead of rambling on, I’ll tell the story with some pictures.

 

Halloween Morning

Here they are having fun outside.  Notice they don’t even have to wear shoes the morning of October 31 in Kansas!  

 

  

  

After everyone had a not-quite-long-enough nap that afternoon we had cake.  These cakes almost ruined the party, but my creative cake decorating saved the day!  I ordered a cake for the three older kids, and what I thought was a matching baby cake for Mr. One-year-old.  Well, when I picked up the cakes the baby cake was orange and purple to match the green, red, orange big cake, and the big cake was decorated in a lovely cemetery theme.  There was a big glow in the dark skeleton covered in a pile of cake crumb dirt and surrounded by several tombstones, very creative, but didn’t quite scream Toddler Birthday Cake to me!  I found a matching smaller cake in the case and it’s pile of dirt looked more like a pumpkin patch so I bought it.  I also bought some cupcakes decorated with little ghost picks and pumpkins.  I took off the skeleton and replaced the tombstones with ghosts and then added the pumpkin and ghost picks.  I also had to rewrite my nephew’s name on the cake because one of the presents smushed the cake a little.  OK, I told you I wouldn’t ramble on, but I just wanted to document how I saved the birthday by fixing all the mess!!!

  

The we opened a ridiculous number of presents, which led us all to decide that Christmas definitely needs to be scaled down this year or we will all be completely choked out by toys and games by this time next year.  Since the cake part was over, we put their costumes on.  I love themes!!  I’m looking forward to Chloe having opinions and favorite characters, but I thoroughly enjoyed picking this year!

 

 

  

Chloe showing Great-Grandma her baby

 

too cute headband only stayed on for about six minutes

I am really glad I got the professional pics of Chloe in her costume because she was way too excited and busy to sit or even stand still for a picture and I didn’t really get any great ones like they did.  I’m still learning how to use my new camera and even though I took hundreds of pictures I really only had a handful I was really happy with.  I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to get and learn some photo editing software to make my attempts at photography look good at all!

2 years of personality

My little princess turned 2 last month.  She has been practicing this for about four months.  Let me tell you, she is already a pro at it!  Following in my footsteps, Chloe had numerous birthday parties spanning several days.

We started off with a morning opening presents at home with our newest roommate, Grace!!

 

not sure I want to open this one

 

 

woo-woo, Chloe loves these trains!

 

ahhhh, the innocence of 2-year-olds!

Then a little cake with Mama to practice for the real thing the next day at Grandma and Grandpa’s house.

We finished up her birthday at the Asian festival here in town.  It seems like a great annual event, very well-attended, very crowded, very loud so we will certainly be back, but maybe not until Chloe’s crowd-anxiety lessens.  She didn’t get much out of it this year, being so young, but I am glad we went.  We had some good food from our favorite Indian restaurant so that made the birthday girl happy!   

We spent the next day at my parents’ house and were joined by several of my cousins and my aunt and grandma.  She enjoyed her day tremendously and it was so great to watch.    This is her reaction to everyone singing Happy Birthday to her.

 

Her pretty birthday dress that I didn’t let her wear until the cake part was over.  What a mean mom, huh?!

She also decided that the most fun you can possibly have is grabbing the hands of two of your adult friends and swinging back and forth yelling wheeeeee!!!!

And just in case you weren’t around us last year at this time, I’ll add one a couple

of my favorites of Chloe from her 1st birthday celebrations!

I have a few more update posts that will be mainly photographic accounts of our other recent celebrations, and after that I think I’m about ready to tackle my first really heavy and substantial topic on this blog.  It’s one that I’m not sure how to put into words so it may take a while.