Tag Archives: fun

Looking Back at 2011

I thought it would be fun to do a top 10 for the year, or maybe 11 for 2011. But it was too hard to condense the year and narrow down my pictures that much. So here are 18 pictures to recap 2011. It doesn’t have quite the same ring as a “top 10” or “11 for ’11” would, but oh well. As you can tell, we had a lot of fun in 2011. And this doesn’t even include all our park playdates, or our trips to the Children’s Museum, the Georgia Aquarium, and Zoo Atlanta, or all her playtime at home, playing dress-up and doing arts and crafts, or a bunch of other random fun we’ve had throughout the year. But it covers most of the big highlights from the year I think. I’m looking forward to 2012 being another great year, and hoping to keep up even better with this blog in 2012.

We started the year with a snow storm in Georgia that had us homebound for almost a week! But we did have fun playing out in the yard! Andrea still talks about it.
One of my all-time favorites of Andrea!!!

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Playing in the Leaves (We’re back!)

We’ve been on vacation for the past couple of weeks, so I haven’t been posting much. I haven’t finished going through all the pictures from our travels, but when I do, I’ll have some more posts about our trip. We had a lot of fun visiting family in both Washington and Utah. But today we had some fun back home in Atlanta. Yay!!! We needed to clear the yard of all the fall leaves, so my husband blew them into a big pile in the backyard and then I took Andrea out to play in the leaves. She loved playing in the leaves last year and asked all year long when we could go out and play in the leaves again, so she was ridiculously excited that it was finally time. Of course I brought my camera out and captured some of the fun. I had a REALLY hard time narrowing down my favorites, so there are a bunch of pictures in this post. She was just having such a great time, I kept snapping pictures and I got several winners. 🙂

I swear this child thinks she’s a model. I didn’t pose her for this at all…
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Slow Week, but a Fun Friday

I haven’t posted anything this week, because we’ve been homebodies this week… partially just recovering from all the Halloween activities, but also I think Andrea has had a slight cold maybe? She doesn’t seem all that sick, but she’s been extra tired and cranky this week, and she had somewhat of a rough week at school too, and has napped several days this week. We’ve also had contractors at the house tiling our powder bath and upgrading the sink and doing a few other small repair projects around the house, so we’ve had some distractions around here as well. So, to make up for a somewhat boring week, we had some fun today at home.

We started the fun off with some painting. She’s a super serious painter as you can see.

Then she decided she was done painting, and she got down and found a tape measure I had out, and started measuring everything she could find. She measured all kinds of random objects in our house, then some Halloween candy, and then measured herself.  And, in an unusual turn of events, she actually asked me to take pictures of her showing off her measuring skills! She posed for the picture below and just kept repeating, “Take a picture of me like this, Mommy! Take a picture of me like this!” So what’s a mom to do, but start snapping away of course!

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Halloween 2011 (Lots of pictures!)

Halloween this year consisted of Trunk-or-Treat at our church on Sunday evening, and then trick-or-treating in our neighborhood on Monday evening. Andrea also went trick-or-treating with her class at the senior center next to her school last week (although they didn’t wear costumes, just orange/black with a little makeup), and she had her friend’s Halloween-themed birthday party on Saturday. So I feel Halloween has been going on for at least a week. It was so fun, but I’m exhausted and glad to be done with pumpkins, costumes, and candy. (Although we’ll be eating all this candy for a while now…)

First, a recap of trunk-or-treat. We decorated my Mazda5 like a princess castle, and it was a big hit. Andrea loved it, and so did the other kids. I hung sheets from the side to make the walls, and cut and spray-painted some cardboard for the top. Then we laid out a bunch of Andrea’s dress-up stuff on the inside, as if a princess lived there. It was like a Disney princess explosion in there. LOL!

Her best friend from church showed up dressed as Cinderella too, and the two were inseparable all night.
Her best friend at church also went as Cinderella. They were inseparable!

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Birthday Party Fun

Yesterday morning was supposed to be Andrea’s last day of soccer, but the game was rescheduled for next week due to some rain we got Friday night. At first, Andrea was pretty disappointed, but she quickly forgot about soccer when we reminded her that she was going to her friend Ryan’s 4th birthday party. She started talking non-stop about Ryan after that. It was a Halloween themed party and the invitation said to wear a costume and be ready for pumpkin painting. I didn’t want her wearing her good Cinderella dress, because I was afraid it might get paint on it, but I realized we had a second (machine washable) Cinderella dress that she could wear. It was a good trial run for her hair and I got to try out the Cinderella headband I made for her. Her hair looked good, but I found out I really needed to pull out the hairspray to get the updo right for our church’s trunk-or-treat on Sunday night.

When we got to the party, we thought it was a little weird that there were no cars out front. It turned out that parents weren’t staying at the party – a party for 3 and 4 year olds! I was pretty freaked out, but the birthday boy’s parents and his aunt and uncle were all there and in costume, and we were the only other adults standing around. I wasn’t worried about Andrea, but I felt really strange just dropping her off for someone else to deal with for a couple of hours. The mom has a few kids, and I see her at pick-up and drop-off all the time, but I don’t actually *know* her. Andrea told us to leave, so we ran an errand, got some lunch, and wondered what else were supposed to do with our unexpected free time. When we picked Andrea up later, she was having a blast. She said they painted pumpkins, opened presents, and played in Ryan’s playroom. And apparently, they served pizza for lunch, but the mom told me that Andrea said she didn’t like pizza, so they made her PB&J instead. (She will eat pizza, but it’s definitely not one of her favorites. I usually have to encourage her to eat it.) At least she knows how to speak up for herself!

I just snapped one quick photo on the way in, but it’s not great because the lighting was all wrong. I knew at the time it didn’t turn out, but I didn’t think it mattered, since I’d take more at the party, but obviously, that didn’t happen.
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After the party, Andrea talked even more about Ryan, and sounded like a little girl in love. It was hilarious. She told us that she can go to Ryan’s house any time she wants. And then she told us that next year for Ryan’s party she wants to be a hula girl. I thought she was going to give Paul a heart attack! LOL. She was so worn out after the party that she told us she was tired and asked us to take her “straight home.” We did, and she went down for a nap almost the moment we got home.

And just a cute funny from later in the afternoon… Paul was cleaning out his wallet and pulled out his Delta AMEX credit card (sample image). Andrea immediately pointed to it and said, “That’s for travelling!” (Well, it sounds like “trabbeling when she says it.) We were a little shocked, and asked her how she knew that, so she pointed to the (triangular) Delta logo on the card, and said, “Because that arrow!” Then we asked where she saw that, because we really weren’t sure why she knew the Delta logo at all, and she said, “At the airport!” Of course she did. She hasn’t been in an airport since we flew to Missouri in April. We did fly Delta then (we usually do), but still… she remembers a logo from 6 months ago? Crazy.

Tonight we had a blast at our church’s Trunk-or-Treat. I’ll post more about that tomorrow after I have a chance to go through all the pictures. 🙂

Pumpkin Painting!

Andrea has been really excited about Halloween this year, and everything about it. We’ve done a ton of Halloween themed crafts, several of which I’ve already posted. And a couple of weekends ago, we went to a Pumpkin Patch with her Daddy and Opa. But we only bought a few miniature pumpkins at the pumpkin patch we went to first, because our church does a big pumpkin sale fundraiser every year, and we knew we wanted to buy our pumpkins from there. So last weekend, we went up to the church and picked out some pumpkins. Andrea wanted to get every small pumpkins she laid her eyes on, but we kept her to 6 or so (at ~$1 / pumpkin, I didn’t mind buying several). But what to do with all these little pumpkins? Andrea had been begging all week to paint them, so finally the other day, I put a smock on her, got out the tempera paints, and let her go to town. The results were pretty cute.

I’ve also been working on finalizing our costumes for Halloween. Andrea is going as Cinderella. She already has the dress and I got her some “glass slippers” from the Disney Store, but she wants a blue headband like Cinderella wears in the movie, and I’m working on how I’m going to put her hair in an up-do like Cinderella’s. I’m going as the Fairy Godmother, and bought a light blue choir robe to wear, and then even used the sewing machine (gasp!) to make a hood and big pink bow for my outfit. Pictures of that will come later. But suffice it to say, Andrea is ridiculously excited about it. Her preschool already went trick-or-treating at the senior center across from their school this week, and she brought home a TON of candy from there. For that, they just used eyeliner or something similar to draw a cat nose and whiskers on her face. She looked adorable when I picked her up. 🙂 Anyway, on to the pumpkin pictures…

Posing with the pumpkins
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