Memorial Day, plus

I've been meaning to update for a while now, but I keep getting distracted by other things on the computer. Not to mention the almost 4 year old who is constantly battling me for computer time. Chloe was recently singing the line, "Lets get down to business," from a song in Mulan over and over so I pulled up the video on Youtube and walked out of the room. I returned to find her clicking from video to video. She figures things out so quickly. Maybe I should look and see if she's got her own Facebook account.

Here's the girls helping me make a cake.
Addie even had cake batter on her eyebrows. I look forward to baking again with them when I don't have a belly. As it stands, I can hardly reach the mixer when they're helping.
We went to a birthday party recently at the Folsom Zoo. Normally it's a really fun little zoo. They have a lot of rescue animals, including feral cats and one winged birds and stuff. The biggest attraction is usually the bear exhibit. Not this time. This time, the kids clustered around the spiral coin wishing well thing, and couldn't care less about the animals.
Chloe and Ellie did make a token effort to look at the bears, but they were hard to see behind the glass in their little cave.
Addie was very focused on the playground.
Chloe had a good time until she realized the slides were too hot to slide down and she was stuck.
We had a busy Saturday Memorial Day weekend. We went out to the bay area for our friend Katie and her son's birthday party. Chloe had a lot more fun that she's letting on. I think she's really just steamed that we made her stop for a picture when she'd really rather be playing fetch with Rex, the wonder dog, or jumping on the trampoline.
This backyard is my favorite. Katie's mom, Robin, is my gardening hero. The girls appreciated her gifts also.


Here's Katie, Ryan and Spencer as he approaches his cake.
And here's pole dancing Addie, covered in frosting post cake. Yeah, my girls like poles. A year ago, Chloe cracked us up swinging from the poles in the tram at CircusCircus, and Addie spent a lot of time when we were camping twirling around the poles of the sun shade.
Good thing Addie also likes Harley's and power tools.
Me and Katie. She looks beautiful, and I wish the picture went just a bit lower so it looked like I had a belly, not just a gut!
After that party, we drove through the delta to Elk Grove. It was fun to drive through areas of California I hadn't really seen before. We attended Bracken's cousin Josh's wedding reception. We walked in to the sounds of a mariachi band, and Chloe immediately commented, "Mom, this is good music!" Apparently my usual choices are a little white bread for her.

We rounded out the rest of the weekend with a nice dinner with Bracken's parents, and shopping for our bathroom makeover. I'm sure I'll devote a whole post to that later, but at the moment we are gutting our barely functional bathroom, and will hopefully have everything completed in the next couple weeks. Before the baby comes.

A final highlight, which I didn't personally take pictures of but will hopefully get soon, was Chloe's dance class on Memorial Day. Bracken had the day off, so he was able to attend, and Chloe was so excited. Miss Joann let the girls perform in the big room so that all the special guests could watch. They performed their little dance routine and it was so cute. I about wet myself, though, when Chloe and Gabi attempted to do their "can opener." Even with help, it was a disaster, with arms and legs and heads all in the wrong places. (Amazingly, though, this week in class they actually pulled it off.) It was "repeat" week at the dance school, so they then performed the dance a second time. Chloe was not interested. Bracken and I could barely contain our laughter as she half-heartedly went through the motions, just wanting the whole thing to be done. When it was over, and the dancers had cleared the floor, Addie took center stage. She spun around and around on her little tiptoes, then lay down on the floor and went to "sleep" at the end, just like the big dancers had done. She wants to be a dancer so badly. Every week she slips some of the extra shoes on and waits by the door to the studio for her turn.

She is getting so big, so fast, though. She is now sleeping in the bottom bunk, and taking all her naps in there, too. Thanks to Ikea, I've gotten their room all organized, for whole minutes at a time. Now I just have to tackle the leftover chaos in the nursery.