Happy Birthday, my lovely little girl

This one.

She is 3 today. I cannot believe my luck in getting to be her momma. 

Best three years of my life.

Why Mariokart is the best:

It's also really fun to get your mom to play it for the first time. Trust me. DO IT.

Pre game instruction:

Intense concentration:

Intense concentration apparently not yielding expected results (because everyone is laughing):

Trying to defend her own honor:

Realizing she has no Mariokart honor to defend yet/trying to turn Luigi around:

"HOW LONG IS THIS RACE?!":

Shannon: That was amazing
Mom: I cannot believe you just subjected me to that/how are you so good at this game?

Missing Shannon

We got to kidnap my little sister from my parents for a few days over Christmas break. It was wonderful. We just loooooove our Shannon. Ava likes to pretend she's Shannon a lot and she tells me all the time that she misses her.

I know, kid. Me too.

R continued

So here's what we did for the rainbow portion of our R week last week:

Tissue paper rainbow on contact paper. It's now hanging on one of Danny's office windows. His coworkers are really impressed with his crafting skills.

Then we made a rainbow ribbon dancer. Except we used tulle. Tulle isn't as flowy as ribbon but it is reeeeeally cheap. We tied strips of tulle onto a shower curtain ring and danced. All morning.

Then we made rainbow drip flower pots. It's pretty self explanatory, non? Just turn the pot upside down and squirt acrylic paint on top. A little bit of paint goes a long way. And squirt each color on top of the last..... or as close to "on top" as your tot can get. Watch as it flows down the side. It's mesmerizing.

Ours took a good 2 days to dry completely.

That was R. At no point in the alphabet are A and B close to R, but I realized during the holidays that I do a better job of all this fun when I'm doing a letter I'm really excited about, and if that means we don't go in alphabetical order, than that's what it means.

Next week: J. For jungle and jellyfish and Jesus.

R: Robots, rockets, and rainbows!

R was so fun. So so fun. It might be my new favorite letter. Also a new favorite? Using my laminator. (More pictures to come later this week when I get a working computer.)