Birthdays, Halloween decs, Scarecrow Festival and Lydia's first dance performance!

Blogger won't let me move the above picture but it kind of encompasses what Lydia's personality is all about lately...SILLY! This is her with her b-day cupcake tower, that she chose out by the way!

I just love Halloween and decorating for it. Here's our Halloween village this year. I love it.
And I love my little graveyard.

Jake did a great job making headstones from scratch this year to help withstand the crazy winds that come flying through our neighborhood.

Our little Lydia is now a 3 year old. I can't believe it. I let her pick what she wanted to do on her special day and for her morning activity she chose Kangaroo Zoo!

Thanks to Brock's example, Lydia finally went down the HUGE slide by herself. Way to go Lyd's.

For one of Lydia's b-day gifts she received a kitchen and she LOVES it. She plays with it non stop. She loves making dinner and snacks for everyone. Nice picture Lydia!

Lydia's cupcake tower, which she picked out herself.

Later that day we headed to dinner with the Clark's and Watt's families. Lydia chose pizza so we went to Firehouse then we headed off to Pack's Pumpkin Patch for our annual pumpkin hunt.

Then we headed back to the house to open all of her presents and have cupcakes. One of the gifts we got her was a little craft/school table. I'm doing my own little preschool, just her and I a few days a week so she can learn all that she needs to before she actually goes to preschool.

Here we are singing Happy Birthday to her. Love her face in this one.

Blowing out the candles. Great action shot. Thank you photographer Joey! Lydia, we love you more than you'll ever know. You are such an angel and couldn't ask for a sweeter, more precious girl to raise. We love you!

Although Larry's b-day is August 25th, we celebrated the day we brought him home (Oct 17th) this year since I was in Ireland on his actual b-day. We got him lots of presents to open.

And he enjoyed ripping them up in a matter of seconds!

Happy Birthday Bubs!!!

Yesterday was the big day...Lydia's first dance performance. I was so nervous for her it was unreal. It was at the Scarecrow Festival so Lynette thought it would be fun to go down to TP early so the girls' could have fun before their performances.

The girls' loved dancing to the chello music that the pirate was playing on the street.

Lydia's arm is getting so much better. She had great aim on all the games she played!

The weather was perfect then about 4pm it got windy, cold and miserable. But we managed to get the girls' ready for their big performances. Here's Lydia in her dance outfit. She was not happy that she was in this tiny outfit and it was freezing outside.

She kept crying to get me to stop taking pictures. Here she is yelling at me to stop. I just wanted the perfect pic. I didn't get that...

Thank you SOOO much to Rod, Sue and Melynda for braving the bad weather to come and support my little girl. You'll never know how much that meant to me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Here's Lyd's warming up back stage with Miss Mo (who just had a baby a week ago, btw)!

Because Lydia inherited my shyness, my only goal for her was to actually make it on stage and to make it through the performance without crying. Well, she met those goals for me. She was taken on stage (you could tell she had been crying), and she just stood there shivering...so sad. I just wanted to go scoop her up and protect her from the pain she was going through being up there.

Lydia has been practicing for weeks "The Monster Mash" and in every practice she has done so good, doing all the moves. In the beginning the girls' lay on the ground and pretend to be monsters rising from the dead...Well, that's as far as Lydia got on the whole performance. Poor thing.

She just stayed in the fetal position the whole time while the other girls' danced. Then Lydia would hear the screams of the people that loved her in the audience and she'd look over in fear. She just held on to her security (fingers in her mouth) waiting for it to be over. I didn't let her see me because I knew if she did, she'd lose it and start crying.

After it was over, we all stood up and cheered for them, especially us that were there to support Lyd's. The Lydia saw me and just lost it. She ran into my arms and started bawling. It BROKE MY HEART. Then I thought to myself, did I just traumatize my daughter? Did I make a mistake putting my shy, little Lyd's in dance class? Then backstage while looking for her jacket Lydia made me realize that she had regrets. Can three yr olds have regrets. She kept repeating over and over, "I wanna do monster mash. I wanna dance with Miss Mo." Then on the car ride home she was watching playback of the video and she kept saying, "I wanna dance like her" while pointing to the girl next to her who was actually doing the dance.

She wanted to do the dance again but this time actually do it. So that gives me hope that she'll get better each time. We are SOOO proud of you Lyd's and all that you accomplished last night. You are amazing and you looked like a little dancing queen last night (minus the dancing part). We love you so much!!!!