Happy Birthday Emerson!

My little girl is 4 years old!  WOW! I love her more than words can express.  She is so loving and fun. And at the same time she is super sassy and independent. She is smart and stubborn. She is hilarious and thoughtful. She is such an amazing part of our family.

The morning of her birthday, we let her open presents from us.  One of them was a new waffle maker so we made a waffle breakfast.  Then, we just got to hang out as a family all morning and watched Tangled of course. :) 

And even played a little Wii.

Our girl loves donuts, so we decided to have an afternoon party at Lamar's with her friends.  She couldn't have been more excited and it ended up being really fun.  We played some donut games, ate yummy donuts, toured the bakery, and then went to play at a park nearby.

Here she is at the donut shop...

Wearing her new Rapunzel dress (Thanks Grandma and Pappy)

 Yep, we ordered a few donuts. And every kid got to pick their own flavor of milk. :)

 Emmy and Hannah

 We threw Beanie Babies into a huge donut target

 Then of course had to eat donuts off a string

 Yum!

 Birthday Cake Donut

 The bakery

 Emmy made sure she was right in the front.

 Opening presents

 Then, that night we had a pizza party at Old Chicago's with family.  We are lucky to have such a great family - almost 20 of us were there to celebrate.
We brought our pink straws and princess plates there too.

We had to keep Smith entertained somehow. :)

 Birthday ice cream and cherries

 Molly was exhausted by all the partying. :)

 Being silly with Grandpa Jack

Have I mentioned I love this little girl to pieces?

Museum and Farm

Zack and I took the kids to the Nature and Science Museum on a day off. They could stay at that place all day long. It's good we have a membership because we can only make it to a few rooms each time we go.

Zane and Emerson and I went to the Mammoth and Mastodon exhibit this time.  They just wanted to pretend they were escaping from the huge animals the whole time.  There was a lot of hands on stuff too.

 Standing by their favorite elephants.

 In the kid's discovery room, Emmy made this girl puppet.  Look at those hands and feet. :)  Zane made a few cool projects too.

 Digging up fossils

 If you look carefully at Smith and Zane's faces, they look identical! Smith loves doing everything with his big brother.

Now Sunflower Farm...

Zane's class took a field trip to an amazing farm and of course Emmy and I had to go along as chaperones. Zack is so awesome to stay home with Smith and Molly while we go do super fun things sometimes. :)

This place was a blast.  It had so much to do and was a beautiful day.

Here's the kids feeding the goats.

 The "jungle gym" was made out of hay stacks.  There were tiny tunnels, wood plank bridges, and all sorts of secret hide outs.  Zane even fell off a huge hay stack and didn't get hurt.

 Feeding the goats corn out of our hands... They went and got buckets full of corn from a little house completely full of corn - like a huge sand box of corn.

 There were a bunch of humungous tire swings

 And bridges and tree houses

 Zane helped nervous Emmy

 They loves this turtle

 hammock

 Zip line!

 They were all gathering for a Kindie picture and Zane was just looking over at me smiling. :) Fun day!