Happy Birthday Maleina!

Another year has come and gone and I cannot believe that my baby is 4!!! She is still all about princesses so we made a pink castle cake this year. Maleina helped me assemble the towers and place the flowers on the cake. As we were decorating her cake she started planning next year's cake already. Hooray for another version of a castle cake next year!

Maleina has grown so much this past year. She has learned to do buttons, snaps, zippers, gloves with fingers, and getting into mischief being her all time favorite. Hopefully one of these days she will grow out of getting into trouble (talcom powder all over Grandma and Grandpa's bathroom being the most recent). Her favorite activity would be to draw, paint, color, or cut (not her hair anymore...Thank Heavens!!). For her birthday Mark and I gave her an art easel with paints, a roll of paper, chalk, and paint brushes. She has already used half of the roll of paper and paints all the time. I don't even bother to put it away because the next thing I know is she will want to paint again.

We are so blessed to have her in our family. She makes us all so happy. I remember one night a couple weeks ago, she was so sick and she goes, "Mommy, you're so cute!" She is always thinking of others and making sure that we are all happy. When Tyler is getting in trouble she will interrupt us and say, "Be nice to him, he is my brother."

For her birthday Maleina's birthmother came over and stayed a night with us. Maleina is blessed to have a relationship with her. She is an amazing person who gave us one of our greatest blessings. She is part of our family and we love her and think of her daily. She made a difficult decision placing Maleina with us and I look up to her for making that choice. We are grateful to her and love her with all our hearts!

Hair Styling Fun!

Now that Maleina's hair has grown out a few inches we are having fun experimenting with different hair styles. As long as the style lasts 2-3 days she loves it because then we just have to do small adjustments the next day and she is off the hook of having to sit still and have her hair done. I love it because it is time we get to spend together and talk about whatever she wants to talk about. I have also loved doing hair since I was a little girl styling barbie doll hair. Here are a few of her favorite styles:



Headband Weave (This is Maleina's personal favorite, not so much for Auntie Mik...we love you anyways.)



Hair Bows



Braided Circle Piggies




Valentine's Day Styles

Super Bowl

Tyler's favorite football team made it to the Superbowl this year....New York Giants. He was super excited so I went to the mall and bought him a shirt to support a team. Tyler made a few bets with friends and one with his Uncle Chris. When the Giants were down he was sweating it big time and worried that he would have to pay his friends money and wash Uncle Chris' car. But never fear, the Giants came out on top and he was jumping up and down so excited that he would get lunch with Chris when we go to visit them this summer.

Ice Skating

One of Tyler's favorite activities is to go ice skating. He loves it and tries to get better all the time. This year, I put Maleina on ice skates and she had fun for the most part. The ice arena has a hot cocoa club where you go and for five minutes Maleina got some instructions from a teacher. It helped her confidence a lot to have someone besides mom try and teach her how to skate. Both kids are doing great. I think their favorite part is when they are done I get them a hot chocolate from the concessions and they love it!

Christmas 2011

We had a wonderful Christmas this year. The kids loved all that Santa brought them and spending lots of time with their cousins. We are so blessed to have family living close by and those that don't were able to come up for the holidays.



Maleina loved her Dream Castle that Santa brought unfortunately the elves were in a hurry and didn't make sure it all assembled well. So we took it back to a store and exchanged it for a Barbie Townhouse which stays assembled much better and she plays with it all the time now.



Tyler's favorite gift was his iPod touch. He loves all the games he can download and play.

Halloween 2011

Another successful Halloween has come and gone. Tyler and Maleina look forward to Halloween for the entire month, the anticipation of getting to dress up is almost as much as their excitement for Christmas Day. They both loved their costumes this year. Tyler was Dracula and Maleina was her version of Princess Ariel. Both kids got to have their faces painted, Tyler with costume make-up, and Maleina with mom's make-up (without consequences this time...LOL)! I took Maleina trick-or-treating downtown for a little while. Mark took Maleina around our neighborhood. He got off easy this year, Maleina got tired of it after only 30 minutes. Tyler went with his two friends Donny and Conner. They call themselves the 3 Amigos. Next year, I should try to get them to dress up like the 3 Amigos that would be fitting to their nickname. I hope everyone had a great Halloween and enjoyed some of the fall activities.

Fall Time Fun!

The last week has been a lot of fun. First, Grandpa, came for a surprise weekend visit. I took the kids with grandma, grandpa, Uncle Justin, Aunt Emily, Braxton, and Natalia to a local corn maze for the first time. All the kids (and adults) had a blast! The favorite part was when grandpa would hide and try to scare the kids. Tyler didn't get scared too easily, but Maleina and Braxton sure jumped a couple times!





Second, Tyler was out of school for fall break, so Mark took Friday off and we went to the Heritage Farm. The kids loved all the activities there were to do: pony rides, train rides, giant slide, hay jump, rope course, and corn maze. Both kids loved being prisoners in the caboose of the train, and going down the slide. The corn maze was fun and with dad's helped we made it out in pretty good time!











Lastly, after our trip to the farm, we took the kids over to a pumpkin patch so they could each pick out their pumpkin. They loved having so many to choose from. Hopefully next year we will have some success growing our own. But the patch was a super fun substitute!