Sunny's Double Rainbow Birthday Party Extravaganza!

Many of you know of Sunny's affinity for double rainbows. This happened after she saw her first double rainbow last year after one of Alyssa's T-Ball games. Ever since this day, she has spoken of almost nothing else. Whenever there is a lull in a conversation she always manages to speak the words..."Double Rainbow" to see if she can spark a conversation about them.

For her birthday she insisted she would be having a double rainbow birthday party. I just knew no other theme would do. So when her birthday came around, we went to town.

I did some research on the interweb for some ideas on decorating for a rainbow birthday party and cakes and games and so on. I found some great ideas and it really turned out to be a beautiful party.

This was the invitation.
Isn't it the cutest thing you have ever seen! Steve made this. I think it's incredible!

I made just a few decorations that I felt really sold the rainbow nature of the party. See here...this is my ghetto version of a rainbow balloon arch.
Made from 4 dozen balloons. It was not all that hard to do and didn't take all that much time. I thought it would be a lot more work. It wasn't quite as neat or perfect as I was hoping, but hey...these are three year olds. Notice the white puffy clouds at each end of the rainbow. I made those too, out of tissue paper from the dollar store.

Next was the Rainbow Curtain.
Made from Polka-dots cut on Jenny's Cricut machine and strait curling ribbon, because that's the kind of string I could find. I thought it turned out really cute and the kids loved walking under it.

We had this on the front porch to welcome everyone to the party.
We had to let them know they had found the right place.

We had way too many kids over and had an absolute ball with them.
Here is the group photo before we got going.

We got things going with a really competitive game of Button-Button, Whose Got the Button.
Always a hit at parties.

We followed that up by a fun round of London Bridges. The older girls helped out.
We ended that game early though, because too many of the two and three-year-olds were scared and crying when the key locked them up. Terrifying.

Next we moved on to present giving.
She got a lot of really cute things. The highlight was the rainbow purse which I apparently did not get a photo of, but it was made by Adam H's mom Kim. It was super cute and she love to carry it around. She also got a new crop of home-made super cute hair bows which both her and Alyssa are enjoying wearing on a nearly daily basis.

Then came the refreshment portion of the party. I made this cake.
Or this assembly of cupcakes. It was one of the fab ideas I got off the interweb. Isn't it so cute?!

We lit the candles and sang Happy Birthday.

Unfortunetly someone beat her to blowing out the candles which made her sad.


We re-lit and re-sang and then all was well.

The cake was enjoyed by all, or at least the skittles and frosting were enjoyed.


The party lasted for about 50 minutes.
It was all anyone especially me could take. Luckily the parents came to pick up their wee ones and the party concluded. I was lucky to have had so much good help form parents who took pity on me and stayed. I also had help from my one-armed mom who was a help despite her broken shoulder.


This is Sunny's bestest little girlie friend.
They love eachother and came wearing matching clothes. Very fitting of the two friends.

After the mayhem, we had about one hour before part two of the extravaganza began. We invited all our Sokol cousins to come to our new McDonalds to play, eat and celebrate.
I expected it to be a rowdie dinner with a rowdie bunch, but instead it turned out to be very calm and lovely. Everyone just sat down and ate the food we bought them.

Alyssa and Brady dined at their own tables and felt very grown up.
I told Bob that I expected this would be the first of many lunches they would eat together once they were both attending BYU together.

We came back and had more presents.
We have such nice cousins who give such thoughtful gifts.

We also had another round of cake.
Yes this is cake two. Perhaps even cuter than the first? I think so.

Here's Sunny opening her present from Mom and Dad.
It's Go-go My Walking pup.
Its a Fur Real Dog that barks and walks.
He is really cute and she was very excited about having him.


They played dogs together for a while....
until she suddenly ran out of steam for the day. Two parties and 9:00pm was all she could handle.
As you can see, the party was still going on around her, she just wasn't a part of it.

In all it was the funnest of days. Exhausting, but super fun and colorful.

Thanks to everyone who made Sunny's 3rd Birthday the best ever.

We love our Sunny Bunny like Crazy! There just aren't any kids in the world like Sunny. They don't come any more adoreble. I love to cuddle with her. I love to hear her suction noise coming from her when she is sucking her fingers. I should probably start getting after her for sucking those fingers, but as you can see from this picture of her when she was 3 months old, she's been doing it a long time.
Same fingers always. It just always reminds me that she is my baby.

We love that Sunny is long-winded. She talks, she hums, she sings, she tells knock-knock jokes always with out a punch line. She love to have her hair done in T-T-glossoms. She adores her sister. She adores pestering her sister. She loves to boss everyone around. She loves to be tickled. She loves to be squeezed and squished and loved. She loves to swing. She loves to go to the park. She loves to eat candy and snacks. She is a good sleeper. She loves to read books. She loves to wake me up first thing in the morning and ask for a treat even though she knows she'd never get one (at least until after breakfast). Three years with her has seemed like a lifetime. She loves to watch Barney, Angelina Ballerina and Super Why. She loves to dance for us. She is a talented little tiny dancer. I can't remember life before Sunny. I love her forever and a day. I wish I could bottle her up and keep her just like this foever, but I can't wait to celebrate many many more birthdays with her.

Butterfly Catchers!

Ever since Amy's wedding, by kids have somehow become obessed with catching butterflies.

Our subdivision is called Monarch Meadows. It is called this for a reason. We do see our fair share of these beautiful butterflies. We often try to catch them when we do see them. We even have a butterfly catcher (leftovers from Amy's wedding. Alas these critters have always been very elusive.

The other day at my mom's house I noticed a beautiful butterfly parked on top of what I believe to be a Butterfly Crack flower plant at her house.
It was sucking nector off the flowers and didn't even notice me sneaking up behind it. I was going to catch it with my bare hands, but I chickened out because of the buggie grossness of touching an insect.

Luckily, my mom had a Kerr jar just sitting on her porch. I grabbed it and snuck up on it again. I easily slid the jar over the Butterfly and it was mine!

We were on our way to a wedding shower for my cousin so I had the kids in the van already so I brought the Butterfly filled bottle into the van to show them.


I let them cover the jar's opening with their hand and they felt the irradic flapping of it's wings fluttering against their hand.
Nothing could bring more joy or excitement to thier faces than this did.

It was so fun to watch them enjoy this experience so much. It reminded me of my own childhood following those little white butterflies all over the yard. I loved to chase them with the Egbert and Olson kids I used to run around with. I remember spraying them down with the hose. Once the were wet, it was a lot easier to chase them because they were a lot slower. I loved butterflies. I guess everyone does.

We let the Butterfly go after we had our fun with it.
You would have expected it to fly away, but no...


What did it do? Back to the Butterfly Crack Plant.
I am going to get one of those for my yard.

Mobility

As previously mentioned, Alyssa learned how to ride a two-wheeled bike a few weeks ago. Ever since then, the paradigm of her life has completly shifted.


She is totally obsessed with bikes, bike rides and biking in general. Luckily her passion for biking is shared not only by her parents, but also the neighbor friends next door.


Haydn,Alyssa, Sunny and often Isabel can be found most days, several times a day riding bikes in and around Weatherwood Lane.

They are having the times of their lives despite the frequent falls and knees and elbows that look more like a patch work quilt of scabs and bandaids.

Alyssa ventured into new territory last week when she learned that she could climb the hills in and around her neighborhood. Steve and I didn't think she would have enough strength or stamina to huff and puff up these hills or enough control to get back down. We were wrong though.

On her first attempt she climed right up the hill to the top of the neighborhood with out even stopping for a breath. She came down too with no problem. She was so proud of herself and Steve and I were beyond impressed.

Sunny was pretty happy too, except she realized that she was going to be left behind as the only member of the family not able to roll on two wheels.

Steve insisted that I take Alyssa up the hill to see what she could do. I had been sitting with Sunny in the drive way while the two of them had been exlporing the neighborhood. I took his advice took off up the hill with Alyssa, the both of us on our bikes.

Sunny didn't like that one bit. She mounted her little push bike and came chasing after us. She didn't have a prayer to catch us though and she knew it. I could tell she was upset.

It was really fun to be with Alyssa and see her progress and do difficult things. It was really sad however when we got back home to see Sunny still sobbing at being left behind.

We took her greif and put it to use. We started looking into getting a baby seat on the back of our bikes. We see a lot of people with bike trailers, but that is a very expensive not to mention exhausting option. Those things are like pulling a parachute behind a bike. Up our hills, we just decided not to consider it.

After looking on KSL and checking some local garage sales, we found a little bike seat for Sunny in my brother Randy's garage. We first tried to install it on my mountain bike but found it to be too small to acomodate such a seat. Next we moved to Steve's mountain bike which is a little larger. It worked great!


And we have mobility!

Sunny loved it. She thought it was great! She loved seeing the world from the baby bike seat.

We decided to set off for a day's adventure around Herriman on bikes. Three bikes and a baby seat. We toured Herrimans parks and trail systems. The kids thought it was great seeing trails they never even knew existed practically in their own neighborhood.

I never realized that they didn't know about them. I ride and ran on them regularly, but never with my kids.

We were out for nearly three hours park hopping and trail riding. We even took a bike tour of the school Alyssa will be attending starting in August.

We had a pretty big hill to climb to get back home and for the first time since she learned to ride a bike, Alyssa had finally gotten enough. I ended up carrying her bike up the last hill into our neighborhood. She was a great sport and made it almost the whole way on her own.

We had such a great magical time. It was so fun to be mobile together. We plan to do it again really soon, only this time we're going to bring water bottles. We got really thirsty.

Alyssa’s Dance Recital

June 7, 2011 was a day that we anticipated all year. It was the Tiffany Dance Company dance recital held at Sandy Amp theater. You’d think in June we would have spectacular weather to enjoy the outdoor recital. As you can see from this photo it was a tad windy.

When I say it was a tad bit windy I mean it was gusty. Like 40 mile per hour winds. Check out these lovely pics with her two grandma's.
It looks like they are sitting in front of a wind machine.

It was so windy in fact that I sat near Alyssa’s dance class because I was afraid the stage lights which were violently swaying back and forth over the top of her class would come down. I am not sure I could have done much if they had fallen, and luckily they didn’t, but I just wanted to be close.

We sat next to our friend and fellow dance class mate Addy. These two have been in dance together for their whole dance careers which so far consists of two years.

Alyssa was adorable as always both on and off stage. We had so much fun doing her hair in sponge curlers and letting them out just before the show. They make her hair look naturally curly. We also had a great time with the make-up. Unfortunately the wind was not a friend to our liquid eyeliner and or mascara. The wind made her eyes water and thus drip and smudge. I’m not sure we had much eyeliner on by the time she went on stage. She was in the 22nd of 33 dance numbers.

She did a great job, despite the perilous winds and accompanying dust and debris that assaulted them during their performance. Her and Addy led the class and remembered all the moves. She was adorable.

I’m not sure she knew where we were at in the audience, but she sure spotted us when she came back out for her bow. Once she spotted us she lit up like the fourth of July! She stood and waved and blew kisses until she was the last dancer in her class still standing. One of the older girls helping with the production had to come and physically lead her off the center stage to sit with the rest of her class to make room for the next classes final bow. She left the audience and all of her fans in the audience chuckling and smiling.

There are so many dance classes in Tiffany Dance Company they had to split the recital into two shows. Unfortunately we were the only Wardle’s in the first recital. All the other cousins came after.

WE were able to get a photo of all of them together during the break. Seriously…look at my beautiful nieces! It’s so fun that we all take dance together at the same studio.


After the first show the wind all but stopped and the second recital was absolutely perfect.

Each of my nieces are very talented and so very beautiful. It was an absolute joy to watch them all dance and to see them in their beautiful costumes.