The Fairy Birthday Tea

This past Saturday Evelyn had her third birthday party! She's very into birthdays and after attending several parties this summer, desperately wanted one for her birthday as well. :) We decided to have it a week early to stay as far away from my due date as possible. While she enjoyed it, I think the attention and energy level was a bit overwhelming for her.
We decided to combine lots of her favorite things - dress up, crafts, and tea - into one party so we had a fairy birthday tea. All the girls came dressed in their favorite fairy (or ballerina or princess) costume then we had wings and they all made wands. The wands, while a great idea in theory, where a little crazy. ;) 10 girls between 2-10 with GLITTER, glitter glue, sequins, glue, etc resulted in glitter and sequins ALL over the house. :p Several moppings and vacuumings later it's getting better, but there are still definite signs of a 3 year old party here. ;) Poor Gracie I think got tapped on the head by a fairy with her wand and after several baths, her head is still quite glittery. ;)
Evelyn was SO excited and woke up that morning saying "I'm all ready for the party!!!" Here she is waiting so patiently for all her friends to arrive. :)

The craft table... Thankful so many parents stayed and helped with craft and crowd control. :) 
Someone was getting sleepy...

I briefly thought about trying to get a picture of all the kids with their costumes and wands, but then thought better of such an attempt. ;) After playing a while they all came back to the kitchen for the tea party!

I think singing and cupcakes were Evie's favorite part...
Got them all out in one breath!

Caroline got hers down in one bite!
 
I think present opening (and there were only 5, so it wasn't tons) was where it became truly too overwhelming. She had LOTS of exuberant help. Yes, Evie is in the middle of this picture. ;)
Half way through the opening Evelyn disappeared. When Nathan found her again she said "Daddy, I'm just a little tired". Then Saturday evening she rediscovered her presents and clearly had no recollection of opening them earlier - haha! She said "MOM! Look at this! And this! Where did these come from???" It was pretty funny, poor girl!
After everyone left we had snuggle recovery time on the couch reading all her new books and wearing he new princess dress.

We can't believe that our little girl is almost 3!!!

The Princess and the Bunny

While the girls do enjoy trick-or-treating and we enjoy the time with our neighbors, I don't get really in to the holiday. Evie picked out what she wanted to be (a princess) a few hours ahead of time and someone gave us this bunny costume that happened to fit Gracie so that's what she was! :) They were both very pleased and felt quite fancy collecting candy (which they have thankfully forgotten about ;)) in their little bags.
We ran into our good friends, Amelia and Daphne at the first house! Amelia was also a princess and Daphne was a chicken - the bunny and the chicken were too funny together!
Grace's favorite candy was anything in a crinkly wrapper :) 
Nathan's grandparents were in town from Oregon so they and his parents came over Thursday evening as well. Great-Grandpa went around to all the houses with us, much to Evelyn's delight :)
After going around to the front section of our neighborhood we went back to hand out candy. This was actually Ev's favorite part. We started to get low at one point so she dumped half of her candy into our bowl so there that there would be enough for all the kids! We had about 60 kids in all I believe (based on our neighbor friend who does a graph of the trick-or-treaters every year - lol - I've copied his statistics at the end of the post ;)).
It was such a pleasant evening, we all enjoyed sitting outside!
We were glad our girls got good bonding time with both Great-Grandma and Great-Grandpa before they flew back!
 

Our neighbor Dan's trick-or-treat summary and graph - lol!
"Here's the trick-or-treating results for 2013 (the bold green line)! Down to only 58 this year (that's 5 below the 5-year average of 63/year). Haven't seen numbers that low since 2009. Visitors were surprisingly consistent throughout the evening except for the burst between 7:00-7:15.
Fellow nerds-enjoy!"

Pastor Chris

A few weekends ago we headed up to PA again for my brother's ordination and instillation as a PCA pastor. We crammed a lot in to the short weekend and loved the time with ALL my immediate family, both grandparents, and several friends. Here are a few pictures from the weekend... I didn't get any of Katie in her classroom (we visited her at school on Monday), any with Kjerstin and her kiddos, or many other things, but you can get the drift. :)
About 30 seconds after we arrived there were two Cinderellas running all over together. :)
and then a third joined them :)

Gracie had a blast with Grandpa and both her Great-Grandfathers.   
That evening we all went out to eat and since it was Chris' birthday as well as ordination, Kate made party bags for all the kids for at the restaurant - great idea and perfect for helping them make it happily through dinner!

The ballerinas and fairy helping Uncle Chris with his cake :)
After church on Sunday we tried to get some sibling and cousin pictures, but you can see how much interest there was in that... haha!
 
The ordination service Sunday night was really beautiful and meaningful. I wasn't prepared to emotional during it! I thought it was just pregnancy hormones until I realized Kate and all of us sisters (who were sitting together) were tearing up! So thankful and proud of my brother!
Monday morning we went to a petting zoo and park before heading back home...
The park had an exercise loop and the girls were hilarious at each of the stops.
I think they eventually resorted to just picking flowers though ;)