Katie's 3rd Birthday!

My little baby girl is three!!  How did this happen??  She is growing up so much and becoming quite the little lady.  She is becoming more and more beautiful everyday and I think we'll have to watch out for the boys when she's older!

At three years old she is full of both sugar and spice.  She can be very sweet one minute and totally obnoxious the next!  She loves to sing along with songs on the radio but she doesn't like anyone listening to her.  If she notices you watching her, she will stop singing and immediately put on a grumpy face.  She loves all princesses, Frozen is probably her favorite movie, she likes Sophia the First, reading stories, bubbles, and playing in water!  She is both super clumsy and super coordinated...if that's possible.  She in constantly running into chairs, couches, walls, etc.  She falls of chairs during dinner, couches, beds, and pretty much anything else she sits on.  She biffs/face-plants it almost every single Sunday walking into church in front of everyone.  However, she is super good at catching and throwing balls.  She also loves to throw balls up and spike them like a volleyball and she is pretty good at it!  She is very talkative and knows how to make us laugh.

We debated between a Sophia and a Frozen birthday party for her but we ended up on Sophia.  We had some little girls from church come over for a Sophia Slumber Party.  The girls dressed up in princess pajamas, decorated crowns, learned to walk with books on their heads and race holding eggs on a spoon, and then then went upstairs to the slumber party.  I had filled the play room with blankets, pillows, sleeping bags, balloons, streamers, and other decorations.  I also had Katie's toddler slide up there and had borrowed a couple of small trampolines for them to play on. The girls each got a snack bag and then watch a slumber party Sophia the first.  It was lots of fun!  Little girls are so much fun!  

We love our little girl and look forward to what the next year will bring us!

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The next day we had birthday cake (my very first homemade icecream cake!) and opened presents from mom and dad.  Katie got a princess castle tent and was super excited about it!

Orlando Trip 2016

This February we were convinced that we needed to take a trip to Disney World with our family.   Jon and I really loved Orlando when we went by ourselves a couple of years ago and we thought it would be fun to take our kids sometime.  Ideally, we thought, our kids would be a little older but we decided that since Katie was free until her 3rd birthday on March 5th and since we were currently living within driving distance, we needed to go for it!

Our original plan was to drive down one day, spend two days at Disney World, and then drive back the next day.  When we got down there and checked out the weather it was supposed to be very rainy the next day.  It didn't sound too fun to walk around Disney World with three little kids in the pouring rain so we decided to just hang around the condo the next day and extend our trip an extra day.  The rainy day at the condo ended up being super fun!  While it was pouring rain- it was still pretty warm and there was no thunder or lightening so Katie, Colton, and I went swimming at the pool in the rain while Jon watched the baby in our condo.  That night the rain had settled down and we drove to Disney Springs.  There we went to the TREX restaurant.  It was fairly pricey but Colton loved it and I'll admit- it was pretty cool!   There were several animatronic dinosaurs and a giant fish tank and the walls and lights lighted up and shook and roared.  It was fun!

The next day we went to Disney World!  Disney World was fun, for the most part.  It was fun seeing the characters and the castle ad riding the roller coasters but it did get hard waiting in the lines.  Specifically with two young kids and a baby in tow!  We were able to switch of waiting in lines for most of them and that made it manageable.  However, waiting in line for almost two hours with all three kids in a narrow line inside a cave to see princess Ariel about did us in!  After that we decided we were not waiting in any more princess lines.  We were able to see Belle by going to the enchanted fairy tales with Belle first thing in the morning.  Katie was sad we didn't get to see more but the lines were just not worth it!  She did love the Under the Sea ride though and we had to ride that a couple times :)

Even Jon got to help out and meet Belle.  He acted so annoyed by it to me.  Sure Jon, you look real annoyed ;)

Ariel trying to get Katie to smile.  She LOVES Ariel but she was too shy to even talk or smile at all!

Colton's interaction with Ariel was pretty funny.  He liked her and but didn't quite know what to say!  Poor boy, dating is gonna be rough! ;)

Katie was pretty gung-ho for the roller coasters, which was fun to see!  Colton was more timid and scared but still went on some of them and seemed to enjoy them for the most part.  We ended up taking a mid-day break and heading back to the condo for naps.  The main shuttle/train was shut down so we had to take the ferry across the lake to get out but that was kinda fun.  When we came back we rode some more rides and stayed up until the fireworks show thinking the kids would love it.  They didn't.  Haha.  They both just covered their ears the whole time and said, "TOO LOUD!  TOO LOUD!"  Oh well.

Real photogenic kids I've got :)

Happiest place on earth... :)

The parade was "too loud".

As mentioned earlier, we had originally planned to spend two days at Disney World but after the first day (despite it being MOSTLY fun), we decided we were Disney World-ed out.  So, the next day, we headed instead to Sea World.  We had So. Much. Fun!  We all had fun seeing the different animals and the kids LOVED the dolphin and whale shows!  Jon and I had loved the dolphin show especially when we had previously been there and we were pretty sure the kids would too!  So glad we were right!  It was so fun to see the looks on their face when the dolphins did their tricks!  (*Sidenote- Talk about devestating...we had a lot of this on video and Katie accidentally wiped Jon's phone so we lost it all :(  )

The lines at Seaworld were also a lot shorter so Jon and I were able to switch off watching the kids on the side and go on a couple of Big Kid coasters!   Sea world also had this whole section dedicated to kids with a giant jungle gym and a bunch of kid roller coasters.  That was a lot of fun for the kids as well!

Waiting for the dolphin show :)

Jon is the 4th row back with his arms up!  He rode this 2 times in a row within like 15 min!  Yay for short lines!

Whale show.

Flamingos are pretty cool!

Our little cartographer.  He loves getting maps at places like this and charting where we are going to go next :)

The next day we drove home and decided we definitely needed to come back again sometime!