The time has come......

Easter Parties!

We enjoyed three Easter parties this week: a Yellow Apple party, a Green Apple party, and Ms. Julie's party.  Elsie's Yellow Apple party and egg hunt were yesterday.  She was so excited to get the eggs and to show off the baby chicks that hatched in her classroom.

Mary Grace's Green Apple party and egg hunt were today.  She quickly picked up her allottment of 12 eggs and we were off to her party, which is her last party as a Green Apple :(.  That's okay, I hear they have great parties in Kindergarden, including an Easter parade from school to the waterfront then a huge egg hunt at the waterfront.  We'll look forward to that next year!

Here are some photos of the parties:

Easter 2010

From Drop Box

Mary Grace's Birthday Tea

The Birthday Tea was a success!  Mary Grace's friends, Mary Margaret, Ella Morgan, Keelin, Haylee Marie, Alana, Zan, Chloe, Jenna, Jilly, and Ann, joined us for the party.  All of the girls were so sweet.  We had grapes, heart-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, flower-shaped turkey and cheese sandwiches, ginger tea cookies, Biscoff tea cookies, fruit tea, and pink lemonade for lunch.  Then the girls played a little.  Then we had birthday cake (a Barbie cake, of course!) and opened presents.  At the end of the party we sent each girl home with a copy of the latest Fancy Nancy book: Fancy Nancy Tea Parties. 
We are so thankful that Mary Grace has such sweet friends!  We did miss Olivia, Lindsey, Lainee, and Maddee, though!

Happy Birthday, Mary Grace!

From Valentines Picnik

I spent the day with the girls to celebrate Mary Grace's birthday.  We started out at Happy Apple this morning, where it was "upsidedown day" (they are on the letter "u").  They switched their entire daily schedule, so we enjoyed cupcakes and upsidedown ice cream before 10 a.m.!

After Happy Apple, we enjoyed a relaxing afternoon at home.  Mary Grace and Elsie played with Zan, our neighbor.  Then we made a trip to the store for some last-minute items for the birthday tea tomorrow.  After that, we went to Cracker Barrell for dinner.  It's Mary Grace's favorite!  What kid wouldn't want pancakes for supper?!  This is the second year in a row that she's requested Cracker Barrell!

We will continue the celebration tomorrow with a tea for several of her friends.  We are expecting around 12 little girls, who will be dressed in their finest for afternoon tea!

Five Years Ago

Five years ago today, I was lying in a hospital bed waiting for this precious child to make me a mommy! But she didn't want a March 11th birthday...........

Spring Picture Day!

Here they are, all ready for Spring pictures at Happy Apple!
This will be their last picture session together at HA. We take Mary Grace for Kindergarden registration on Wednesday. It's hard to believe that it's time to send her off to big school already! Time is going by so fast! I know it will be a great experience for her, though. She'll have a beautiful new school building to go to and a wonderful teacher. And it looks like she won't be starting school until after Labor Day! WooHoo! That means we can take our St. Maarten trip again! We're just waiting on the final school calendar to come out to confirm that.

Disney!

We had a wonderful time at Disney last weekend! Our trip had two purposes: first, to celebrate Mary Grace's 5th birthday and second, for me to run the Princess Half Marathon.

Nana and Momo drove down to St. Marys on Thursday in time to see soccer practice. We headed down to Orlando on Friday morning, stopping in Jacksonville to pick up Chatham at the airport and in St. Augustine to do a little outlet shopping. Dr. Danks flew into Orlando (Elsie wanted to know why he was flying "into a rainbow") on Friday night and Stephen drove down after work on Friday night.

Stephen, the girls, and I stayed at the All Star Sports resort on Disney property so that we could take the bus to the Magic Kingdom and to the race on Sunday morning. Nana, Dr. Danks, Chatham, and Momo stayed at a timeshare off property.

We met back up at 9 am on Saturday morning to spend the day at Magic Kingdom. We treated Mary Grace to a make-over at the Bippity Bobbity Boutique in Cinderella's Castle first thing that morning. She chose a Belle dress and shoes and picked out long hair for her hair style. I think she was overwhelmed and felt like a true princess! She was so precious!

After that, we spent the entire day at Magic Kingdom, enjoying all the usual rides: Teacups for Elsie (where, as you can see from the photos, she was overjoyed to get a "lellow" teacup), Space Mountain for Stephen, Small World for the kids, Peter Pan's flight (my personal favorite), Aladdin's Magic Carpet ride, and others. Of course, we also visited Mickey and Minnie's houses and met with them at the judge's tent and met Bell, Cinderella, and Princess Aurora.

I was up well before daylight on Sunday morning for the race. Race instructions told us to be on the bus by 4 a.m. for the race. When I got to the lobby of our hotel at 3:45, there were hundreds of other runners waiting, as well. I finally got on a bus at 4:40 and was in my start corral by 5:30. I was in the first corral, so I started the race at 6 a.m. I finished in 2:04, which was a little slower than my goal time but I'm blaming that on being on my feet all day on Saturday and getting only 4 hours of sleep Saturday night!

After the race, we enjoyed a yummy lunch at Downtown Disney and then headed back home. We dropped Chatham off at the airport just in time for her 7:45 flight to Raleigh and then had dinner at Cracker Barrell in Kingsland. Nana and Momo stayed one more night and were able to drop Mary Grace off at school and Elsie off at Ms. Julie's on their way back to Raleigh on Monday morning.

It was a wonderful, fun weekend!