Birthday pics

Thought I'd post some pics of Amelia's birthday. We had my parents, brother and sil and kids over for a little cookout and then the kids decorated cupcakes. And yes, all the cupcake decorations are rather valentiney -- nothing like after holiday sales. :) I'm putting these in small, hope you can still see them, I just have alot to add. The first one of Amelia cracks me up, she is so much like her mama and so NOT like her sister. Everyone was singing to her and she wasn't sure that she liked being the center of attention (obviously, you all know that Isabella has No problem with this) I had to include a picture of her and her teddy because he might as well be part of the family.


Here's Isabella and Olivia decorating (pouring on the sprinkles)

Had to make this one a little bigger, here's all the kids together. Even my nephew Tyler, who is 11 joined in. Poor guy, he's surrounded by toddlers. You can't really tell in the picture, but the girls aprons all have cupcakes on them and the chefs hats actually look like cupcakes with a cherry on the top, my sil and I both happened to buy them at Target. You can see the birthday girl is enjoying herself. She could care less about the cupcake, she wanted more icing.


Then on her actual birthday, we drove a couple hours to a big zoo, the girls were all excited, the first animal we saw was an alligator, still excited, then we saw Snakes behind glass and this is what happened.






Amelia was terrified. You can't really tell in this picture, but she would SCREAM if we would even get close to the glass. We would try to get close to tell her they couldn't hurt us, they were in a cage, etc and she would hold onto us as tight as she could and scream "NAHHHHHHH" We actually even saw a fake snake and tried to show her it was fake and she did the same thing. And let me tell you, this girls got some pipes on her, everyone was looking at us. As horrible parents, we did find her scream amusing -- I know we're terrible --- no we didn't try to scare her or take her closer (well at least I didn't, can't totally vouch for Kenny :) , I really felt bad for her, but it was just the fact that she would be so happy and calm and let out this huge "NAAAAHHHHH!!" that kind of cracked us up. Just didn't expect it from such a little girl. :) Thankfully, she loved most of the zoo. She loved the little kidzone area where she could dig and play in the dirt. And both the girls loved the little playground, which I have to say is the cutest playground I've seen. I'm not going to post all the pictures, but they had a rope climbing wall, that actually looked like a spider web, the slide was a huge leaf, they had squash and other things to climb on, etc. It looked like a huge garden. They both really liked the sea lions, not sure why those didn't frighten Amelia, but she seemed to like them.
They both acted like they wanted to ride on the carousel, but once we got up there, Amelia started screaming again at the animals. Isabella was happy though - I think she mainly came to see the elephants and ride the carousel. Amelia did ride, sitting on mommy's lap on a bench. :)



And since the carousel had all kinds of zoo animals to ride, she being my, oh so girly girl, picked such a girly animal to ride, was it the cute otter, or the polar bear, oh no the giraffe........ yeah right......