First Day of School

Emma started 3rd grade this year.  Yikes!  I just had to share these pictures with you.  She chose her first day of school outfit, and it looked very familiar.  Yup, she's worn this same outfit for the first day of school 3 different times!  I guess we've definitely gotten our money's worth our of these clothes!  She wore them on her first day of Kindergarten, 1st grade, and now 3rd grade.  I don't know what happened last year - guess she forgot or something.  I feel safe in saying that next year will be something different, because there's no way this will still fit her.  It still fits her well enough though, and if that's what she wanted, I wasn't going to argue.  It's just funny to me.  So here for your viewing pleasure, ordered oldest to most recent, are the first day of school pictures featuring this outfit.

Kindergarten.  The outfit was brand new at this point.

1st grade.

3rd grade.  The final first day of school for this outfit.

Turning Eight Is Great

For her birthday party this year Emma wanted to have a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory party, and wanted to actually watch the movie during her party.  Well, since that is just about as easy as it gets as far as planning is concerned, I had no problems with this.

Invitations

After some online inspiration, these golden tickets were inside the invitations.

The girls arrived (because Emma wanted a girls only party this year), and first had to guess how many pieces of candy were in a couple different dishes (the winners were announced at the end).  When everyone had arrived, they watched the movie.  Eric ran to pick up some pizzas, and when he got back we had an intermission for everyone to get their food and drinks.  Everyone loved the popcorn maker we borrowed from a friend, and almost everyone had at least 2 bags of popcorn.  Eric had no problem having this around for a few days.  He now says he must own one.

The table ready for drinks and food, the goody bags above, and the popcorn maker.

After the movie we did presents followed by cake.

The movie was all about chocolate and candy, so I went with this cake.  Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, covered in mini m&ms and surrounded with Kit Kat bars.  The fact that Kit Kats are Emma's favorite candy was just a bonus!

For the rest of the time while waiting to be picked up the kids played chocolate twister (just like regular twister, but with some chocolate perks added), and other games.  At the end of the day, if the birthday girl is happy I know we did our job right, and Emma had a blast.  That's all I wanted.

In the attempt to make it feel more like a candy factory, we made some giant suckers and other large sized candies and had them all around the room.  Emma is posing with a few of her favorite giant suckers.

Renaissance Fair

We went to the Renaissance Fair again this year.  Not much changed from last year of course, but we still had fun.  Here are a few fair moments:

Trying her hand at archery again.

She sped up the 18 foot wall fast and with hardly any effort.  I was impressed.  

So we let her try the 24 foot wall.  As you can see, she mad it up there too!

Just taking a moment to relax.

Some Beach Fun

We went to the beach with some friends and had a ton of fun.  The beach was almost exclusively ours.  This may have had something to do with the very strong wind that day, but we decided to make the best of it and stick it out.  It was too windy for beach umbrellas, which makes this very fair-skinned-and-burns-way-too-easy mom a little worried, but I just kept putting the sunscreen on and everything was alright.  Other than my attempts to thwart sunburns, the day was very relaxing.