Princess Laurel turns 3!

So many things have happened here in the last few months. I just got out of the habit of updating this blog. I debated whether to go back and add in all the other good stuff, but I'm exhausted! Today was a great day. Laurel turned 3!!!! I can barely believe it. She is so fun. Everyday she must wear a princess dress, but today we truly made her feel like the princess that she is.
Here are all the kids at the small party we had for Laurel. Laurel said she wanted Ethan, Cameron, and her best friend Kate (red-head in the orange jacket) to come. So, we invited the entire Hill family over for tacos and cake. Grandma and Grandpa Williams came too!
Laurel got just a few presents. She received "Enchanted" the movie. She has been going around singing like the princess Giselle in the movie for a few weeks now after borrowing the movie from friends. She was so thrilled! She also got a lot of dress-up clothes and accessories. She is at the perfect age for pretending. She often wants to wear her lion costume, but now I will have something else to look at. She loved it. The first picture in this blog was her wearing her crown, glass slippers (that seem a bit dangerous for a little girl to be walking in). and jewelry. Later on in the evening she had all this plus purple satin gloves, an Easter bonnet with the tiara on top and a silver sash. Too bad I didn't get a picture of this. She looked more like the Queen of England than a fairytale princess. She was unforgettably adorable.

This is the cake for a princess. It was HUGE. I will be inviting people over for cake for a few days to polish off this baby! Laurel chose it from several pictures of cakes I showed her. She is becoming so much of an individual and is really figuring out how she is different from all the boys. I love it!! I can't lie. I love indulging her a bit into this fantasy world. She just glowed today. She truly is a princess!

One of my favorite pictures of the night. Three beautiful princess girls. Laurel so often seems left out, because she doesn't always want to do all the things that the boys do. Today, she was so spoiled by the girls in the house. They dressed her up many times and played with her. She really felt special and it showed!

Caution: Kids at play

Saturday was a beautiful day. It was an unexpected venture to the park, but it was lovely to be outside that day. Much more inticing than the last few weeks have been. We are impatiently awaiting Spring to truly arrive. I just hope that we don't have to wait until August.

Lunar Eclipse

Walt captured a few nice pictures during the lunar eclipse on the 20th. Too bad we had a cloud cover during the total eclipse, but this is what he could see through his telescope. Beautiful!

Be my Valentine!

Mother: "Sit down all together, and let me take a nice picture of all of you."
Children: "AHHHHH! AHHHHHH! Oh, did you say something, mother?"
Mother: "Sit down so I can take a picture of you."
Children: "He's touching me! Ouch! Mom!"
Mother: "SIT DOWN! I want a nice picture on Valentine's Day!"
Children: "Okay. Hee, hee. Ha, ha. Wait a minute. What are we doing again?"
Mother: "I give up. Just sit down. I'm taking the picture!"
--This is the resulting set of pictures.
Luke is sure growing. He is 5 months here. I have taken a picture of all my kids on Valentine's with a paper heart. Unfortunately he destroyed it before I was able to get any pictures of him with it alone.

Valentine's Day was really fun for us this year. I think in the past I have mainly focused on Walt and I, but this year I wanted to make it a family affair. I cooked pink heart-shaped pancakes for breakfast. We made alien valentines for Ethan's Kindergarten class, and then had to make some for Cameron. They were made with a green heart folded in half to create a card. Ethan and Cameron drew faces with Hershey's kisses for noses and pipe cleaners for antennae. I wanted to make these foam fortune cookie shaped valentines with the boys, but they had only interest in making alien ones. They won. We also made a few sugar cookies to pass around. At dinner I made teriyaki steak, salad, baked potatoes, and a cherry pie. Cameron insisted that we have candles, flowers, and a table cloth. All of which we never use, but it did make it special and the kids loved it! They all have dirty faces in these pictures, because I hadn't initially planned to take their pictures. I was mostly trying to capture Luke's first Valentine's, but when the camera comes out, so do my picture hogs.

Ethan is losing teeth, and Luke is trying to find his. I always thought kids without teeth were SO cute. I'm not sure now. Sure the child is adorable (I'm his mother), but I find myself oddly mesmerized by the fleshy vacancy. I'm not sure I have ever looked at it so closely and often before. Ethan loves it. I guess every kid sees it as a rite of passage. Going from a small kid to a big one. And BIG he is. I just measured the boy at just shy of 4 ft. 3 inches at 6 years old! I am having the hardest time keeping the child in pants that fit! I won't be surprised if he reaches 6'3" or more. Crazy. At this rate he'll be taller than me at 12!

I had to add this picture purely because I love Luke's smile. That alone was worth keeping this picture.

Laurel the Lion

Laurel LOVES this lion costume!!!! I found this hunting through the baby boy clothes in December. This was a costume that I think both Ethan and Cameron have worn for past Halloweens.

I had all but forgotten all about it, when Laurel snatched it up and demanded to put it on. She wears it EVERYWHERE. I have been all over town with her in this, and she always gets so much adoration over it. It always get dirty when she wears it, but it is the first thing she wants to wear when it come out of the laundry pile. She is in the height of imaginative play, and though it can grate on my nerves to deal with keeping this costume clean and take her places in it, there is no denying that she is "melt-your-heart" adorable in it.

My favorite is when someone she doesn't know asks her if she is a lion and she replies, "RRRROOOAARRR!!!!" As ferociously as a 2 year-old beautiful girl can. They usually smile, and know that indeed there is a bit of lion in her! She is fiesty, but deceptively gorgeous!!!

Walt's Birthday (More Than Meets the Eye)

The boys planned Walt's birthday this year. They were so excited about Transformers that they just had to give him an Optimus Prime cake. He also recieved the shirt he is wearing in the picture. He asked early in the day if he was getting anything that wasn't about Transformers. "Yes," I said, "one thing." We gave him Eletronic Battleship, which to date Ethan has used more than Walt!
Also in honor of the birthday, Walt brought home his Transformers collection. I think to date, he has about 90 of them!!! He keeps them at work. This keeps the kids from breaking them and me from going crazy looking at them. I think this is part of his Peter Pan complex. If anything this collection is keeping him young and connected to our boys. We invited over another family whose dad is crazy about Transformers, and has given his two sons a devotion to them much like our family. It was funny to see the dads play, the kids watch on in awe, and the moms enjoy motherly conversation. It was a good day.
The Optimus Prime cake up close in it's full glory!

Lucas' Blessing

Luke was blessed on Dec. 30th, 2007. All of the older children were blessed within a month of being born, but Luke was nearly 4 months old. We were hoping to be able to involve most of our family members by waiting until December. Too bad that didn't work the way we had hoped. We did, however, have a small grouping of family present for this extra special day.

Blessing Luke at 4 months meant that he could not fit into any of the previous blessing outfits (not that I minded!) It stood to reason that I would have to find him a special outfit like all the others had too. I know that babies do not have to wear white, but it is just fun. I didn't want to spend an outrageous amount on it, so when I found this cute knitted set at Target I knew it was perfect. He looked so adorable, and he was warm.

The rest of these pictures are ones that I took of our precious baby in his blessing outfit. I took all the other kids to Wal-Mart to get pictures, but I haven't loved their pictures as much lately. I think I was able to capture several nice ones myself.