Lucy turns 3

 We celebrated Lucy's third birthday last week!  

Reading the card from Grandma and Grandpa. 

 Opening the big box!

A flashlight!  This is the very same flashlight that James played with as a boy.   

 Here he is showing her how you can turn the light green or red, and telling us he used to pretend it was a light saber.  

There was a lot of other great stuff in that box (puzzles, outfits, books, Candyland, COOKIES), but somehow that was the only picture I got of it.

Fake snow! 

 Arctic animals!

James built this with two of his buddies.  It's a sensory table (basically, a coffee table with a hole sawed in it.  A bucket goes in the hole, and voila: a less than $10 sensory table which cost about $100 if you buy them in a store).  You can put all kinds of fun stuff in there for kids to explore, pour and build with: water, dry noodles, dried beans, etc etc.   

 She's not sure what it is yet, but she's excited.

 This penguin is ready to play in the snow.

Charlie hangs out with me while we make some snow. 

 It was kind of creepy to mix this stuff.  It's just a dry powder, then you add water, it turns white and then expands and fluffs.  The container says it expands 100 times its original size.  It even feels a little cold.  It's also reusable-- the water evaporates and it turns back into a powder.  When you want to use it again, you just add more water.

 The Arctic animals in the snow.

 And an igloo ice cream cake to top it all off.  This is definitely not my best work, cake-wise, but everything did not really go according to plan.  The ice cream cake would not release from its mold (bowls), so I had to just ice the bowls with Cool Whip.  After we sang and blew out the candles, we just scraped off the Cool Whip and ate the ice cream out of the bowls.  But now I have learned several lessons about working with ice cream cakes.

 Here she is smiling, but at one point while we were singing Happy Birthday, she turned away and folded her hands very solemnly... it looked like maybe she thought it was a meal prayer?  

 Early the next morning while Lucy was still asleep, Charlie found her Happy Birthday balloon and had a grand old time pulling it closer and closer to himself and then letting go. 

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