she is 5! he is toothless!

i made this little summer shirt for my baby, for her 5th birthday. she is a horse rider and friend, a chicken lover, an egg gatherer, a flower picker, and a plant tender.....this fabric was meant for her! thank goodness it turned out, cause i was planning on making a skort, you know shorts with a skirt front, to go with it, and i read the pattern instructions wrong, and once again asked the husband to help see where i went wrong. and after a solid 30 minutes of us both studying the directions, i saw it. i can't even explain what i did wrong, it hurts my brain too much. but you know what i learned? that i KNEW i was doing something wrong at that step where i strayed from correctness, and i just plowed through ending up in a world of incorrectness, that i could not backtrack from in any way, an hour and a half later. so, i learned that unless i like that world where skorts don't come together, i better listen to myself when i KNOW i am doing something that doesn't feel right. so there.

but look at her in this shirt down there. what a sweet july shirt. for a sweet sweet amazingly precious july girl.

those are the presents i had all wrapped up and ready to hide. ever since zen shorts came into our world, we've given each child a present, on all birthdays. the birthday kid gets a little more, but everyone gets a little somethin. it's just more fun.

my son's vampire nature revealed itself on this day too.....just kidding.

one of his top front teeth just fell out of his mouth. all done with its job. his man tooth is coming on down. my boy is becoming a man, slowly, slowly slowly. . she is painting her nails just before her party starts. is she a girl, or what?

and here are her candles coming to her .....

and this was one of my favorite things at the party.....the children were loving hanging out of this window, and then climbing in and out of it. i don't know why, i just loved that. and here i am listening to zhi as she hands me a dime, and tells me to give it to noah, who is in the forefront of the picture, with the batman cape. the girls were giggling away, scheming up funny things to do, like give coins to the boys. these children are precious.

okay, and now i want to show the cutest party favor bags. i was in love with these. i bought these little canvas bags at joanne's, and filled them with everything you would need to take yourself out and be ready to water color whenever. when the kids started checking them out, they all looked at the tincture bottle, and thought we'd given them medicine. they started dosing themselves gladly, with water. pretty cute. i bought a large pad of watercolor paper, and just chopped each piece of paper into little squares, tying them up into a bundle with string. i also bought two sets of water colors in tubes and put three different colors in each bag, along with two brushes. and the dropper bottle for adding your water with precision! and then the cloth i used to wrap the paints in can be used for wiping up any spill or mess. so satisfying. all this cost less then $5 a bag. pretty awesome, i thought.