Lydia's birthday ++

The girls' spring school pictures came home last month.  

Karina 2nd grade:

Lydia Kindergarten:

Derek and his bear 'Grizzly' dressed as twins in coral/orange shirts and plaid shorts.  Derek was proud.  

It made me smile to see Derek asleep on the couch with Snoopy snuggled up on his leg. 

Karina made this cool display for a school project.  The project was to pick a foreign culture or country and create a carriage for Cinderella that would work for their culture/location.  She picked Lapland, and Cinderella, the Sami, has a sled for a carriage with a reindeer pulling it on snow. She painted the northern lights in the sky.

Karina made a cool fort out of a box:

Snoopy was asleep too before I took the next picture, until I decided to run downstairs for the camera.  Of course he woke up for the picture.  Lydia and Snoopy cuddled up on the floor of Lydia's bedroom with Lydia sound asleep:

While I was trimming my overgrown azalea bushes on the side of the house, I suddenly noticed a nest. I turned off my trimmer to get a better look, and found two baby birds with their mouths wide open waiting for mom to bring them food.  I stopped trimming the bushes and Nate tried to cover the nest as best as he could with some azalea branches that I had already trimmed, to give the baby birds some protection from the sun and rain.  The next morning, I saw the mommy bird sitting on her nest and babies were doing well.  She might have been a Carolina Chickadee though I'm not 100% sure.  A little over a week later, the baby birds were gone from their nest, so I hope it means they learned to fly, and not that they were eaten by some predator.  

More Snoopy snuggles:

Lydia turned 6 last week!   

Derek had such a tantrum when Lydia started opening up presents.  I suppose he won the tantrum, because the result was that he got to open up half of Lydia's presents:

For months Lydia has been begging to get her ears pierced and she was super excited to do it the day of her 6th birthday.  We headed to the piercing parlor and she picked out little star earrings, and we finally got her ear lobes marked in a spot I thought was centered.  Then when the time came to do the actual piercing, she began to cry and was super scared.  There were two ladies working at the piercing place, so they each put an earring in their piercing guns and told Lydia they were going to measure her ear.  A few seconds later and her ears were pierced!  Both sides at once!  Lydia did think it hurt and she cried quite a bit, but was happy again about it by the next morning.

 

Newly pierced ears:

Showing off her ears here too:

For her birthday, Lydia wanted to go camping.  The compromise was that she and Karina slept open-air on our deck on an air mattress.   They loved watching the fireflies. Unfortunately, they woke up before 5:45am because it was bright outside. 

Lydia had a birthday party with friends the next day with an egg hunt (I had 700 eggs hidden!), a shark piñata, and some games.