Birthday-ness success!!!

This is parts one and two of the birthday. (And today was part three with pink eye and colds, blerg.) Celebrated up in Granger with mint chocolate chip cake (yeah, it tastes like what you're thinking!) and her doll. Grandma used scraps of fabric from things she had made the girls to make matching outfits for her doll. sweet!
And then we had a Golden Mystery Surprise party with some of her school friends. Favorite parts of the party were cheese balls, bubbles, clues- they were unscrambling the letters R-I-D-E to figure out the big surprise at the end and came up with "dire". :) Lots of fun, lots of girls and lots of love for this girl.

One week from today and school's out! Hooray!!

Where we are, where we been...

These are photos I took of the girls each week in March at our neighbors backyard. We love this time of year... watching things come up, making soup out of all the plants... but I am reminded in the midst of all this life that there is a death. They are connected, joined together. Maybe a better way to say that is Life comes after death. 

I saw a quote on a friend's wall and it made me think of all this beauty. "You have neat tight expectations of what life ought to give you, but you won't get it. That isn't what life does. Life does not accommodate you, it shatters you. It is meant to and it couldn't do it better. Every seed destroys its container or else there would be no fruition." 

The deer are back :) just when we thought they were gone, three big ones, eating tulips in our yard.