Life Goes On

Lily turned five this week.  The weekend was all about her birthday party and making sure she had  a great party and birthday.  It was actually quite therapeutic for me.  I spent a lot of time decorating with Lily.  She had a blast decorating and when I was done she kept putting streamers up on the walls by herself.  We had wall decorations, streamers, ceiling hangers, and one of those giant wall coverings.  The theme was princesses.  Lily is all about princesses this year.  She wanted a castle cake with princesses on it.  One of her presents (her first present) was a pack of magic clip princesses.  And we put them on the cake.  If you remember my disaster trying to make Lily's cake last year, you will understand why there was no way I was going to try to make a castle cake.  I bought it at a bakery.  It tasted so yummy and looked amazing.  Lily loved it.

I also planned four games for her party.  She just had family over but they all got into it.  We had them draw a dragon and then Lily picked the one she liked best.  We had a quiz about Lily and whoever got the most questions right won the game.  Lily asked the questions and then provided the answers.  Then we had a castle building competition with blocks.  I had two boxes with identical blocks and we had team Chloe and Team Lily.  There were three challenges: fastest castle built, tallest castle, and best moat.  Everyone was involved and had a great time.  The last game I was pretty proud of.  I had a bell you can ding and I split everyone up into two teams and two people would come up at a time and I would ask them a question and they would have to answer with the name of the princess.  The first person to ding the bell and say the name of the princess won a point for their team.  I called the game "name that princess" and I thought up all the questions myself!  It was lots of fun.  Some of the questions were:
Which Princess lives in France?
Which Princess falls in love with two men?
Who is the fairest one of all?
Which princess is friends with mice?
Which princess has a tiger for a pet?
Which princess marries Prince Phillip?
Which princess has magical hair?

So we all had a good time.  Now I have to start planning Chloe's birthday.  She is into Cinderella, so her theme is going to be Cinderella.

Last night I finished Lily's stocking, or rather, my Mom finished Lily's stocking.  I can't sew.  I helped iron... and Made the charms. 

So Yea!  It's all done with 8 days to spare.  It's absolutely beautiful.  But there is no rest for the weary.  I need to get started on Chloe's stocking so it will be ready for next year and  then I will finally be all caught up.  For now....

With it being the holidays, I have not  been eating well.  Too many treats around.  Birthday cake, toffee, cheesy popcorn, cookies, party food.  Bleh.  I'm going to have a lot of work to do to lose the holiday weight when it's all said and done.  But interestingly enough, I seem to have lost my taste for soda.  I'm not sure how it happened.  Somewhere between morning sickness and miscarriage I lost my taste for diet pepsi and I've just been drinking Perrier.  Bubbly water.  I'm drinking more water than ever before each day, and willingly.  Because I want to.  I don't know how it happened but one step in the right direction is still a step in the right direction.  It is one piece of the puzzle, and a problem I thought I would never solve.  I thought I would never get off of diet pepsi, and yet here I am.  No desire to drink it.  And I have a giant case in the garage, but I keep choosing Perrier instead of pop. 

I'm doing better emotionally but I'm very tired.  Part of it is my eating habits at the moment, but I think a big part of it is just recovering, and all the blood loss.  I still have to go into the doctor for blood draws (I sure hope the insurance will help pay for all the lab work my doctor is requesting), plus the kids are waking up a lot at night with leg aches.  Poor Chloe had terrible leg aches last night. And so life goes on.  I hope all of you are enjoying the holidays and spending lots of time with family and building lasting relationships. Christmas is next week!