Teresa's Birthday Party

Look, I'll just tell you now: this post has a lot of pictures in it. Like, A LOT of pictures. We took over 600 pictures of T's birthday party. But don't worry, not all 600 of them are in this post.


Only, like, 4-something.


Ha ha! I'm kidding, it's way less than that.


Anyway, for Tressa's second birthday, I wanted her to just have an awesome day of doing whatever she wanted to. We decided to take her to Greenbelt Park, which is a national park up here, between us and D.C. We'd been there twice before and T loved it. It is the perfect place for Tressa-like children, it has several playground areas and tons of open fields. It was so nice to just let her run and play and do whatever she wanted without us ever having to tell her no about where she could go or play. We had a picnic there, but of course T was not too interested in eating much, there was too much fun stuff to do!

Teresa and Granny had fun on the slide:






She did some swinging with Daddy:



Nora snoozed through most of the party:









Love it. This girl has endless energy and this was the perfect place for her to run some of it out:



She did finally take a break to eat some chips:



And Nora woke up near the end, so we took some pictures of her too :)





Both sets of grandparents got to come to T's party. Man, was it nice having six adults to two children!

With Granny and Grandad Ricker:



And Gigi and Poppie Milligan:









Ha! T is totally picking a diaper wedgie in this pic...





I can't believe she is two already! She can't believe it either, apparently. She's the best.



After two hours at the park (she still cried when we left, she would stay outside all day if she could) we headed home for cake and presents. She did not love getting sung to before opening presents. But then, wouldn't you cry if someone put a huge pile of presents in front of you, and then made you sit through their mediocre singing before you could open them?



I guess I should have flipped that picture. She was leaning against Marc's legs, and he took it looking down at her, so that's why it's upside down. Now you know :)



After last years cake, I swore I would make a much simpler cake this year. But then a friend offered the use of their Mickey Mouse pan, so how could I say no? I knew T would love it. I was soooo nervous it would stick and not come out of the pan right, so I shortening-ed and floured that baby three times before I put the cake in to bake. And it came out perfectly! Seriously, I was shocked.





T loved it, she kept asking to "open da Mackey".





We sang to her again before the cake, and she liked it a little better that time:

We sing happy birthday to T from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Nora didn't get any cake, but she did get to hang out with Grandad!



This one is the best, too. She is closing in on the four month mark already!



Just in case you wanted to see even MORE pictures from T's party, you may look on the facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150195268916205.308248.532436204&l=db5ab4dc2b

The one with Granny and Grandad

We've had lots of visitors up here for the past few weeks. Granny and Grandad came up for T's birthday and Nora's blessing, then Gigi and Poppie joined us later in the week. The girls have been loving all the attention - I'm sure they'll be bored with just me to entertain them after all the grandparent lovin they've been getting.

Grandad wanted to visit the Naval Academy, so we headed down to Annapolis for a day while they were here. Annapolis is a totally cool city, if you come visit us, we'll take you there ;).

Nora looked totally cute waiting to go, she's just over three months here.



Granny and Grandad and the T outside the Naval Academy visitors center. Way cool place, we learned lots of new stuff about the Navy here.



And in front of the Navy Ram



After the Naval Academy we took a little cruise of the Annapolis Harbor. T wasn't a huge fan of sitting on the top level of the boat, so we all sacrificed and sat down in the air conditioned cabin instead :).









We also went to Mount Vernon. Totally cool place, we'll have to go back sometime, because we didn't do or see half of what we could have. Teresa was cute wearing her leash, we called it her tail, and she was NOT pleased if we dropped her tail.





That's George Washington's mansion house, way back behind Tressa







They had an awesome little play area for kids T's age, she loved playing with the doll house. In case you can't tell, it's a replica of Mount Vernon.





Granny and Grandad impersonated George and Martha Washington for a while...



Poor Marc was working all week, so he didn't get to go with us, which also meant that I had to drive everywhere we went. I have to say, I've ended up having to drive in D.C. WAY more than I ever planned to when we moved here. Our awesome totally lame GPS got all confused and ended up sending us straight through downtown D.C. on the way home from Mount Vernon, which was definitely the last straw for our GPS. I guess that's what we get for buying a TomTom.

Happy Birthday Teresa!

Today Teresa turned TWO! I can't believe it, time flies, etc, etc. But, seriously, I'm amazed that I have a two year old. She has changed so much over the past year, we were looking at pictures from her first birthday, and I think she changed almost as much from one to two as she did from birth to one. We had her little party and celebration yesterday, and eventually I'll sort through the 600+ pictures from that, but for now, here's a picture of our little two year old:





Okay, that was two pictures. She's having a ball this morning, playing with some of her birthday presents.

Here she is last year on her birthday:



And the year before:

Some Tressa Stuff

Tressa is a riot. She keeps us on our toes, for sure. I finally found my ipod again, and was planning to start using it during our morning jogs. T had other ideas:





I guess I should look for some more Tressa-friendly ear phones, because she has no plans to give it back any time soon.

She is talking up a storm lately, she's just always making us laugh. She adores the cat (who we finally named Pepper, but we still just call her 'the cat' all the time). She was trying to play with a ribbon with the cat today. She was doing a really good job, and the cat was actually playing with her, but then T got over excited and made the cat too nervous.



Here are some videos. The last one isn't very exciting to watch, but I wanted to get all of her giggles on camera, and she was sitting in my lap, so...most of the visuals ended up being the carpet and our table legs, but at least I got the cute giggling. So if you watch the last one, be sure to crank up your volume.

TandCat2 from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

TandCatagain from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

Giggles from Tara Milligan on Vimeo.

She also wanted to try taking a picture, so here are T's first pictures with only a tiny bit of help from me:





Being almost two (nine days!), she wants to do more and more things all by herself. Today as we were leaving to go visiting teaching, she wanted to climb up into the car by herself. She's done it before, but I usually help boost her up at the end, because she can't quite make it all the way. Unfortunately, today she lost her footing and fell back down to the ground. And on the way she smacked her chin on the step of the car and bit her lip. I could not believe the amount of blood that came pouring out of her lip! It was awful, by the time I got her back inside and upstairs to the bathroom, there was blood all over her face as well as her hands and arms. Luckily, Marc is off school this week, so I didn't have to deal with it alone. It looked really, really bad at first, and between sobs she kept saying "car, owie, car, owie". It wouldn't stop bleeding, especially because she kept scraping her teeth over it again (which was really making me squirm, it looked so painful). This was our first slightly-major-ish injury, so we weren't really sure if she needed to go to the doctor or not. We called her doctor's office and they told us to go to the emergency room. I didn't really think that was necessary, but we figured it wouldn't hurt. By the time we got there, T was acting perfectly fine, and she'd stopped bleeding. Her cut looked a lot better with out all the blood on it, and the ER was packed, so we decided to skip it. We went to CVS instead and got some orajel to numb the pain, and a mickey mouse balloon, and those plus a nap have her almost as good as new. Anyway, here's a pic of the injury:



She was not a fan of how numb the orajel made her mouth.