Last of the Birthday Parties ('til this weekend)

I guess my girls' birthdays are officially over. We had our last, and most important party, with all the family. The girls had fun, although both were fairly tired after a fairly jam packed week (last couple weeks, actually). Of course, tired didn't stop Annie from staying up 'til almost 10 that night, playing cards and Apples to Apples with the rest of us.

On Monday Annie opened one last gift, from Great Grandma Verla at the Memorial Day family reunion (I took pictures of Annie and her friend Kian, who we had with us for the day, so that'll be another post), which I think pretty much wrapped up our girls' birthday celebrations. Just short of a week long, so not bad. My birthday is this week, then Greg's is four days later, so we still have some celebrating to come, but I think we're done with the girls' for this year.
Below are some pictures from Sunday night, while we celebrated with a lot of our family. We missed having the girls cousins here this year, since Annie would've loved to have had another her sized person there to play with and maybe then we would've blown up the bouncy house again like at her second birthday party for her and Connor, but we felt lucky to have had as much family show up as we did.

Ellie took advantage of a distracted Mom, and grabbed her own spaghetti bowl and went to town. So, I just let her feed herself the whole meal. It was adorably messy.Here's Ellie with Aunt Andrea. Ellie's in outfit #2 here (there were three altogether.)I think Ellie loved this birthday card more than just about any other present, at least for awhile we couldn't get her interested in opening other gifts.

Annie's ever present tongue, and Ellie practically making out with the baby doll Grandma Ruth gave her.Annie hugging her new dress that Grandma Ruth made her, Ellie back to her beloved card.

Ellie with her new baby doll.Ellie using her new baby doll as a teething toy.

Annie with her new Madame Alexander doll that Grandma Ruth gave her. Grandma even made her a beautiful little dress, to match the amazing dress she'd made for Annie. Annie's pretty excited that they can be twins.

Ellie was so tired by this point . . . and since she's not typically a 'cuddly' baby, I enjoyed the snuggly time.

Annie happy about another pretty dress!

Ellie staring at her cake with awe . . . right before she tried to grab it and Uncle David blew it out from across the table just in time.

Ellie enjoying her cake.

Yum.

Annie was also a fan of cake (her sheer joy probably comes from it being real cake with chocolate frosting . . . Ellie had a carrot/fruit sweetened cake with no added sugar and almost no added fat.)

Annie got almost as messy as Ellie though.

Although, only Ellie got frosting up on her eyebrows.Ellie and Uncle Cody eating bread together.

This is one tired little birthday girl with her Uncle Cody.

Annie making sure Grandpa K.C. had his chance to talk with Aurora and Belle on her new princess phone.

Annie's new princess book came with the above phone, plus some cute little cardboard makeup compacts. So she promptly ran upstairs and grabbed some of my brushes so she could apply the fake makeup. To Uncle Cody.

Touching up her own makeup.

Uncle Cody was subjected to a lot of fake makeup.

Oh, and one story from the party I wanted to add . . . before it started, Annie had been playing around in the backyard and riding her tricycle. So she had her helmet on. Then she went to play tether ball with Uncle Cody (have I mentioned we have a tether ball pole in our back yard . . . the girls LOVE it! Annie likes to hit the ball around, and Ellie thinks it's hilarious to watch it swing around. Annie is notoriously bad at tether ball :-) . . . it knocks her around quite a bit.) Cody asked if she wanted him to take her helmet off while the played, to which responded, "No Cody, that's OK. You'll just hit me in the head with the ball soon anyway."