Emmie's 3rd Birthday!

In June, we celebrated a very special little girl's 3rd birthday- our cousin Emmie! Kenna was very excited not only to receive some mail addressed to her, but also that the invitation asked her to pick out her favorite princess outfit to wear to the party! Kenna chose her favorite one, a medieval-style princess gown that Papa and Mimi gave her about a year ago that she has loved almost to death- we had to hand wash it to clean it up a bit for the occasion!

She was so excited to pick out all her princess accessories, all the way down to her high heeled dress up shoes, and that Mommy had wrapped Emmie's present in a princess bag!

We ran a little late waiting for little brother to wake up from his nap, and when we got to Emmie's house, Princess Cinderella was just arriving too! Her dress was beautiful and her hair perfectly in place, just a princess should be. She started by reading us a story about herself and Prince Charming, of course.

 Kenna loved sitting with her best princess buddy, Emmie, who was also dressed like Cinderella!

Princess Cinderella brought lots of fun activities and surprises with her for all the girls! Things like face painting, dancing to princess songs, and stickering their very own princess crowns with their names on them. Kenna chose a rainbow on her cheek for her face painting, and was so cute waiting patiently and watching while Cinderella painted her. Here she is working on her stickered crown kit:

After birthday cake and lots of yummy pink treats, Every princess got to take a picture with Cinderella, and then Uncle Jason and Aunt Alisa very thoughtfully included a copy of it in everybody's thank you notes! What a thrill to meet a real life princess!

Finn on the other hand, was very careful to stick close to his Daddy and make extra sure he was not mistaken for a princess.

As we wished Princess Cinderella and each other goodbye, Kenna was given a princess art set with markers as a party favor. She was high on all the princess girly goodness! (The two pieces of cake she ate probably had nothing to do with it!)

She still loves to play dress up in her purple stickered crown and use her princess markers. Happy birthday Emmie, and thank you for letting us come play princesses with you!

Family Paint

I'm so thrilled that Kenna is majorly into artsy crafty things. Her favorite by far is painting! Almost every day she begs me to paint, or asks me at bedtime if we can paint tomorrow. This time she invited Daddy to join her, and when Finn went down for a nap, we all three painted together!

 I want to encourage and facilitate her creativity as much as possible, but sometimes painting just sounds like way too much of a mess to do every day. We found some easy ways to make the set up/clean up not such an ordeal- we use a little styrofoam veggie tray as a paint pallet, which washes off easily to be reused several times. When we got something large in the mail that came separated by large squares of cardboard, we saved them in the basement and they make the perfect sized table top that we can set out quickly for messy projects.

Kenna sat and dictated an idea to Daddy and he painted it to her exacting specifications- a "scary switch" with scary teeth. Then afterwards she wanted the witch to have a dress, and Daddy somehow managed to fit that in as well.

Here is their finished collaborative masterpiece:

 

Mommy painted a Kenna-inspired "happy" sign in pink and orange:

And here are some of Kenna's finished ones. The first one picked up the texture of the cardboard beneath it. The second one reminds me of big slices of summer tomatoes! However, Kenna likes to pick which of her "pieces" go on our fridge, and neither of these were worthy to make the cut. Too funny.

She is such a prolific painter that I ended up getting one of those little cardboard shelf files meant for magazines to hold all her finished sticker, paint, and marker creations!