Four!

My baby girl turned four this week. It sure is true when they say that the days are long but the years are short. I can't believe what a big girl she is now. She's so smart and funny and sassy and imaginative and just plain awesome. We are so very blessed to have her in our family.

We baked her cake the day before and she was so looking forward to decorating it. The first thing she said this morning was "now is it time to decorate my cake?"

She thought there might be some presents downstairs for her...

Nora was so cute, she kept saying "balloons, balloons make me happy"

Already wearing her Rapunzel shoes.  

Teresa has long wanted some princess dress up shoes, but I have never, ever been able to find any that fit her feet. They all seem to be really long and narrow. She found some Cinderella shoes at Target a few months ago and insisted that they fit perfectly and that she loved them, but I could see how tight and uncomfortable they looked. Luckily the Disney Store seems to have changed their dress up shoe sizing, so we were finally able to find some that fit. She was totally surprised to unwrap them, as it had been months since we went to try them on.

I promise she was excited to wear her tiara.

I love those girls. We got some little finger puppet party favors and they were having so much fun making up stories with them. 

One of T's stories. She kills people off pretty often, I'm not sure what to make of it...

Puppets from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Teresa requested waffles and sausage for her birthday breakfast. She loves sausage like Nora loves bacon...

Pin the horn on the unicorn. She said this was her favorite decoration! 

Thrilled that she won. 

I just think Nora is cute.

Teresa had a VERY specific vision for how she wanted her cake to look. I will admit, it was incredibly difficult for me to give up control of the cake decorating. Especially when she insisted on purple frosting. Is there a less appetizing frosting color out there?

But they had fun directing me and adding the purple frosting and sprinkles.

You can see where T got impatient with her sprinkling...

I think she had a pretty awesome day. After presents and breakfast we took them to a bounce house for a few hours, where she proudly announced it was her birthday as soon as we walked in. 

And here's the annual birthday interview. I love how formal she is at the beginning. It was SO much easier getting her interview this year than when she turned three.

Birthday Interview from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

And before you ask, I don't know what fruit meyer's are, and I'm assuming meat-dogs were in reference to the sausage links we had for breakfast.

The One Where we Visit a Church

I'm pretty sure I can count on one hand the number of full weekends Marc has had so far in 2013, so since he finally has not only the whole weekend, but a four day weekend, we decided to do a little bit of exploring that we've had on the list for a while.

We drove past this very old church a few weeks ago and had been wanting to go back and check it out some more. T was very impressed with the "princess castle temple".

It was pretty cool - the followers of John Wesley had been meeting in that location since the 1770's, but the church that's there now was built in 1896.

The girls were fascinated with all the graves - I'm pretty sure this was their first time in any sort of graveyard. There were some super old ones, from the 1800's, but also some as recent as 2009. It was kind of cool to see that many of the headstones had names that coordinated with different town and county names around here.

Teresa really liked these two stones, and called Marc over to take pictures of her with them.

We thought this grave was appropriate for Memorial Day this weekend. 

And, of course, we had to take the opportunity to get some pictures of our girls.

                     

Teresa's laugh in the above picture was in response to me swinging Nora around. Poor babe slipped right out of my hands as we spun and went flying. Luckily she landed in a nice thick patch of grass and thought it was funny. 

  

  

                                       

                                       

And I found these two on the camera from a few weeks ago. Silly girls.