four year pictures

these took me so much longer to get up than i originally planned.  i think i have really bad timing when it comes to scheduling pictures and weather.  thankfully, i have a husband who is helpful whenever i need him and a daughter who was excited no matter when we took the pictures.  although the excitement certainly wore off around picture number 2 when she kept asking if we were done yet.

i think i have a major problem with over and under editing.  i'm sure i'll look at these tomorrow and wonder why i posted them already.

anyway, we love this girl.  she sure is a joy to have in our home with her sweet smile and her happy, bubbly personality.

our little munchkin turned four

our katelyn dear turned a whopping four years old in may.  definitely the highlight of our month.  katelyn was looking forward to this for ages.  we are so glad to have this sweetheart in our home.

of course every year i tell myself i am not going to spend time making those crazy decorations that look oh so cute but aren't necessary. but darn you internet, i got sucked in again by all the pretty pictures and made them.

katelyn's birthday party theme request was snow white, otherwise i probably wouldn't have chosen red, blue and yellow together for a girl.

we have early morning church, so we didn't have a lot of time to play together. but the kids were being silly, so i decided to snap some pictures. 

i don't think tanner heard me right when i told him to put his face through the bars of the chair.  i'm pretty sure he thought i said: tanner, make the fattest face you possibly can.

after church katelyn couldn't wait another minute for presents.  we let her pick a couple of presents to open then made her wait until tanner woke up to open the rest.

dress up from mom and dad

clothes from grandma and grandpa bastian

round two of opening presents.  katelyn decided she needed a new dress on.

camera from grandma and grandpa hedin

purse filled with goodies from grandma and grandpa hedin

thank you, thank you, thank you everyone for your generous gifts.  katelyn was thrilled with everything.

i think we ended the day with a bang when we finally had katelyn blow out her candles and eat her cake.  she was practically drooling over her cake when she saw it for the first time in the store. 

she was waiting very patiently for the cake.

we took both kiddos out that afternoon for a picture of them on katelyn's birthday (and mother's day).

i think katelyn's fourth year will be a wonderful year.  thanks to everyone for making her day so special.

some warm weather

i'd be lying if i said we haven't had any nice weather here because we have.  it has definitely been few and far between though this spring.  we are so ready for the warm weather to stick! 

i decided early on this spring that any time we have nice weather, we go outside. it is a rule, not just something fun i try to do for the kids.  i learned my lesson the hard way when warm weather first hit.  i told myself that i had too many errands to run and playing outside could wait until tomorrow.  wrong-it couldn't.  because what happened the next day?  oh, it rained.  and that seems to happen pretty much every time we have some nice weather.  hence the new rule.

look at this! it was actually warm enough for shorts.  in fact, it was hot that day.  (i kind of feel bad looking at these pictures.  i changed into shorts and left my kids in long pants.  bad mom moment).

tanner feels that he is big enough to do just about anything.  i think it comes with the age and with having an older sibling.  minutes later he bent over to pick up a stick and dumped out half of the water bottle.  cute kid.

i don't know why, but i just love the way this kid holds his drinks.  he tucks them safely in his arm then wanders around with it. 

both kids resting in our chairs. 

the flowers have finally bloomed, and they're so pretty.  i just love waiting for the flowers to come out, although i've started noticing that someone has been picking just the tops of the flowers off.  i'm pretty sure it's tanner, but boy is he sneaky because i've yet to catch him.

i'm one of those moms that keeps their kids pasty all summer long.  they'll thank me later i'm sure.  i just loved how hard katelyn was consentrating trying to get some out herself. 

tanner loves flowers and is always telling us about them when he sees some.  if i need to distract him outside, i just tell him to pick some dandelions (which are all over right now).

but picking flowers always leads to destroying them.  poor flowers.

more beautiful flowers growing by our house.

i had to step outside of the gate to take a picture of the flowers.  tanner looked so sad watching me  like some poor, neglected kid.

tanner running around with his "tail".  his white onsies are all too little, so they are always sticking out of his shirt.

hopefully we'll have many, many more opportunities to let our feet hang down in the grass!  warm weather, please come back.

easter weekend

we had a great easter weekend! we were so lucky to have tyler's mother fly in and spend the weekend with us. it flew by, but that always seems to happen when family is in town. we kept ourselves busy!
of course with it being easter weekend, we thought it would be a great time to decorate some easter eggs. we knew this would be a big hit with the kids. they decorated our big bowl of eggs in no time flat.  tanner even had a little taste of a boiled egg. (not his favorite thing).

examining the egg.  tanner was serious about his work.

katelyn was definitely more careful than tanner, but she didn't hesitate to drop and egg in, take it out and move onto the next one.

tanner tasting the boiled egg.  he wastn't a fan.

the whole gang.  i love that tanner is still trying his hardest to get as dirty as possible.

we also decided to drive up to madison to check out our state's capital.  we took a tour of the capital, but i can't say i heard  a ton of it. tyler and i took turns walking around with tanner during the tour.  he is not at an age where he will sit for something like that.

a replica of the liberty bell.

in efforts to try to conserve energy when building the capital, they decided to include skylights in almost (maybe all?) all of the rooms. the plan was to keep lights off and just use natural lighting to see.  sadly, the plan didn't work like they had hoped.  even with those large skylights they still have to turn on the lights.  and did you know that there is one lady in charge of changing every single light bulb in the capital.  before they changed over to energy saving lightbulbs she was changing a little over 100 lightbulbs a day.  now she changes around 14.

lady liberty herself.

the dome from inside.  it was beautiful.  do you see the red dot?  that's a red balloon that has been stuck up there for quite a while.

we also checked out the madison botanical gardens.  too bad we went at a time when nothing was growing yet, but it was still fun.

we had to keep an eye on our little runner because you were not allowed to touch any of the gold paint on this building.  i'm not sure why we let him walk on it.

one of the days grandma was here we visited the village of wauwatosa.  there were a lot of cute, quant stores to check out.  one of our favorites was a store that only sold olive oil.  they had the olive oil in these big containers where you could walk around and taste test before buying.

it was a busy, fun weekend with grandma!