Lily turns FOUR!

Lily's birthday fell on a Monday this year, which happens to be her only day of the week that we don't have anything scheduled. We wanted to make her day special like we did for Ella. But we weren't going to throw her a little party or anything. After opening a few presents in the morning, we decided to start the day off at the Pancake House with B-Pa. And the extra fun and special part of the day was that Andrew took the morning off so he joined us!!

B-Pa and Lily at the restaurant and Lily taking a picture of me taking a picture with her new camera (her "big" gift from us).

After breakfast, we headed to the Mall of America. Lily has been asking to "go see the fishies" for quite a while so we thought it would be fun to take her to the Aquarium for her birthday. She also rode a couple rides and visited the Disney Store, the Lego Store and Apple (Daddy needed a new power cord) before returning home for the afternoon.


We had a quiet afternoon and then got ready to have B-Pa and Gramma Clare over for dinner. The girls even set the table (without me asking) and went about making placecards for everyone. I had nothing to do with this I swear (though, I have been known to use placecards in the past for big meals). Nana Mary would have been proud of them! We had Lily's FAVORITE dinner of cheesy potatoes and hot dogs (the adults had grilled hamburgers). And then we had cake and a few more presents.


By the way, we have worked with Lily on her name since this photo was taken. She now does the letters all in the correct order and her big "L" has the slide across the bottom instead of the top. ;-)

Lily had asked for a Kai-Lan cake. She had seen the party paraphernalia in the Birthday Express catalog I get in the mail. Well, Kai-Lan has not debuted at any of the bakeries around here yet so we had to improvise. I bought a bakery cake and there happened to be a bakery Kai-Lan Mega-Bloks set at Target. So we just plopped the figurines on the cake and Voila! Instant Kai-Lan cake!




All in all, I think Lily had a really great day! So hard to believe she's four already! Here's a couple retrospective photos for you...and then a slideshow of her day.

We decided when we were pregnant with Lily that purple was going to be Lily's "color". We had so much pink from Ella and we wanted her to be her own person even though she would be living in all of Ella's old stuff. So Andrew wore a purple shirt to the hospital for Lily's birth. This has become his "Lily shirt". Notice he's wearing it in the last picture.

And here I am at Lily's first birthday with a purple shirt on. :-)Believe it or not, this is actually a different purple shirt than I had on before. I felt I needed to wear purple in honor of Lily and Andrew pulled out his "Lily shirt" for the day. It actually has a hole in the elbow now. So he just saves it for special occasions.