K Turns 6!!

Well, we did it. K has crossed the threshold and is now SIX!! Ahh! Okay, really I am so proud of her. She is such a kind, loving, thoughtful, smart little girl that I look forward to seeing who she is in ten years...well, maybe 12 or 14! :-) For some reason their wake-up clock was off by half an hour on this morning so when she came out early, I was glad I had set up the night before!

Reading her own cards is such a nice thing!

One of her love languages is gifts and she shows it every time she gets something.  How, you may ask, did M and I end up with a child with gifts as a love language?  Simply put: this is one of God's ways of "rounding us out".  It is not very easy for us to "learn new tricks" but we are slowly getting there.  We have even started writing notes for her just because she loves them.

Nana L made her the rest of Astrid's outfit.  She got the cape and boot covers for Christmas from Auntie Bethany and the skirt, belt, headband and arm covers for her bday. She is full on Astrid and so proud!  Astrid, by the way, is the female character in How to Train Your Dragon 2 and Stormfly (the blue one) is her dragon.

You can imagine my elation when we looked through cakes online and K decided the best one was the dragons pretending to eat the cake.  All I had to do was make a sky and clouds and break it.  It's hard to tell but Toothless has his face in the chocolate of the cake.

Since we were going to have a smaller party (about 10 kids) we decided on everyone becoming dragon trainers.  So, step one in our journey was to make shields.

Step two was to complete the training course (aka obstacle course). We had everything from flying on your dragon...

...to making it through the bounce house...

...to throwing a flying toothless across the line...

(this one had the most pictures because it was the only one where their faces were turned into the sun)...it was a beautiful, perfect day!

...to traversing a mighty river on stones...balance beam in the background...

...to stabbing the bad dragon with the sword.

And when it was all said and done, each kid got their very own little stuffed dragon (thank-you Amazon for 'add-on' items!!).

At the very moment we were going to do the cake, K decided to try to wipe off her racing stripes because they were starting to itch her face.  She got them half way off...

This took us quite a while to get completely off and she kept making a puffy face and holding her breath, which someone got enough of a kick out of to take a picture.

What I didn't realize was that I was mirroring her face the whole time.

Well, we got enough of it off to stick the candles in and go for broke.

After she blew out the candles, she posed so perfectly for me, only to realize she had left one candle still burning.

Presents are always chaos!

We had a great time, though I neglected to take as many pictures as I usually do, but I guess that is all right, she turned six and had a great time.

Speaking of my big six year old, she is getting so much more adventurous and brave and, well, less of a total girly girl every day.  She is still 100% girl and even cries at sad scenes in movies, but at least now she climbs on piles of trees for hours on end and wrestles with her friends and doesn't cry every time she gets a scratch.  All we ask for is a tough, hard-working girly girl, and that, it seems, is who she is becoming.

Thank you for the presents and cards and blessings! As you pray for K, she has a virus of some sort that is causing white bumps to show up on her body.  I thought it was allergies at first but we got her in to the allergist and her eczema breakout was just her body's response to the virus. She has had it for about six weeks but it can take 6 months to four years to clear up and there is really nothing medically that can be done.  Her body just has to fight it off.  Please pray for her body to heal quickly!

May God Bless each one of you!