Birthday girl

Elise’s birthday is the day after Halloween, and to be honest, it’s kind of a pain. I know it could be worse, on Christmas or Thanksgiving, or Columbus Day, but I get into the Halloween zone and kind of forget about her birthday. We get home from trick or treating and all I want to do is go through the candy and pick out all the good stuff, but I still have presents to wrap, decorations to put up, and a cake to plan.

I've been thinking about starting her in some sort of dance class for a little while and when some other girls we know decided to sign up for one we decided to along with it too. Luckily for us, the first class was on her birthday so we went along with it and told her it was all part of her birthday present. She looked so cute in the dress she picked out and was spinning around all morning in it. Her class went pretty well. She hasn't shown a huge amount of natural talent for it, but it’s only for 6 weeks and she’s having fun so it doesn’t matter. And it puts a smile on your face Saturday mornings to see 8 little girls prancing about in ballet dresses.


She saw a Barbie cake at the grocery store a few months ago and was very impressed by it so I thought I would give it a shot, though Ben really wanted to do this cake for some reason. I am horrible at decorating and I had some issues with drippy homemade frosting, but she loved it. Opening presents took forever because she wanted to play with every single thing immediately but she got plenty of new books and toys to at least keep her busy for another month until Christmas hits. We got her this Princess laptop with a bunch of learning games which I know she likes because I had to take it away to punish her for something yesterday and she completely flipped out for about 15 minutes. That was fun.





Looking back on this year, I can't believe how much she has changed. She has become her own little independent person who now talks back to her mother and bullies her baby sister and will only eat Life cereal. But along with that she loves to cuddle and read books, she's incredibly generous with her hugs and kisses, she gets so excited over the littlest things, and mostly is just the cutest thing ever and scares me with how much she learns every day.