Happy Birthday, Chris!

Happy Birthday to the most amazing and wonderful man that I know - my husband!

I think one of the hardest parts about Chris being gone during the week for work, is that we miss out on a lot of special days as a family. And today is one of those days. It just doesn't feel right that he is away from his family on his special day. Birthdays were always a pretty big deal at my house growing up. My mom would always make our birthdays really special. Actually, she still does and I'm 33 years old! I hope I can do as good of a job at creating those birthday memories for my girls as my mom did for my brother and I. So, I guess that's why it's a little hard for me when we aren't all together on a special day.

At least Skype was there to help save the day and to help up all be together via the internet. The girls were able to talk to their daddy and sing Happy Birthday to him. Ella and I have been singing Happy Birthday for the past couple of days in the hopes that Maddie would pick it up. She did pretty well. She definitely had the "happy birthday" part down. I think they were just excited to see daddy on the computer.

Chris and the girls planted flowers around our one little tree this weekend. The girls had a blast! They even picked out the flowers. Can you guess which color Ella picked? Her favorite color, purple.

Happy Birthday, Chris! All of your girls love and miss you!

Easter bunnies

Let me just start off this Easter post by saying that I am SO happy that Easter is finally here and gone. Why? I seriously don't know if I could handle Ella asking me for the 300th time when Easter was going to get here. It was really cute at first and I thought it would wear off after a couple of days. Nope, that didn't happen. She would literally asked me at least 10 times a day if it was Easter yet. That is no exaggeration. From the time she got up until it was time to go to bed, she had Easter on the brain. She definitely amazes me.

We had Easter at our house this year. A first for us. We usually go down to Fayetteville and spend the day at my parents house. We decided to change things up this year and have my parents come up to our house. And Chris's brother, Erik, who is a freshman at Georgia Tech, was also able to spend the day with us. It was so nice getting to spend the day with our family.

Chris and Erik made an awesome team in the kitchen. It's kind of funny how both of them really like to cook. They made a great feast; peach bellinis, lamb, orzo salad, a green salad, and yummy swiss chard. To steal a line from Maddie's favorite TV show at the moment, Yo! Gabba Gabba, there was definitely a party in our tummies! Thanks for the feast, boys!

This picture was taken two days before Easter. I was only able to get this shot before Maddie took the Santa hat off. We thought it was hilarious. Ella with the bunny ears and Maddie chanting "ho, ho, ho."

All of these pictures were taken the day before Easter at the egg hun in our neighborhood. The girls are now egg hunting pros after going to this egg hunt and one the previous weekend. Maddie is an egg hunting machine. She was focused and on a mission; to get as many eggs as possible.

Hope everyone had a great Easter!

Inspired by Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver is my new favorite person. He isn't actually new to me but my love for him has grown over the past couple of months. And no, Chris doesn't mind my love affair with Jamie because he loves him too.

We were first introduced to him almost seven years ago, when a friend of ours gave us a Jamie Oliver cookbook as a wedding gift. Our friend is British and I just thought he was trying to push his British lifestyle on us. I think we may have flipped through the book and then tossed it on the shelf. He definitely wasn't getting much love back then. Then a couple of years ago, Chris got another one of his cookbooks as a gift. Ever so slowly, Chris would make some things from it and they were good. Later, he received another one of his cookbooks and again, practically everything he made from it was awesome. So, this past Christmas I gave Chris Jamie's newest cookbook, Food Revolution.

For the past three months, Chris has pretty much been making all of our dinners from recipes from this book. Everything that he has made has been AWESOME. Seriously, some of the stuff tastes like something I would get in a restaurant. Let me just take this opportunity to say that I am so lucky to have a husband that loves to cook. Not only does he love to cook but he wants to make healthy and nutritious meals for our family. How did I get so lucky? He's a great cook and I love it that he cares so much about the kind of food that we put into our bodies. It's really due to him and his cooking that I have starting to have an appreciation for eating healthy.

Anyway, so I love Jamie for coming up with this cookbook and I love my husband for making us tasty dinners from it. In case you didn't figure it out, we're pretty big fans of Jamie. Well, last Friday Jamie's new show, Food Revolution, debuted on ABC. Jamie set up shop in Huntington, West Virginia, the unhealthiest city in our nation, to help reform their eating habits by working in the schools and educating the community. It's a great show and you should definitely check it out, if you haven't already. Fridays at 9 pm on ABC.

And while you're at it, head on over to Jamie Oliver's website and sign his petition to get better food in our schools. He hopes to get one million people to sign his petition by the end of his tv series (there's only 5 more shows!). He wants to take it to The President and show him that this is an important issue. It takes 20 seconds. So, please click here and sign up. My two little princesses will thank you for it.

Part 2 of Ella singing

Here's the second video of Ella singing at her school concert. Yes, it took me this long to upload it to You Tube. Not sure what was going on - probably operator error. These two songs were sung by the entire school.

Part 1 of Ella's public singing debut

Here is the first installment of Ella singing at the Happy Hearts Dinner. This is her singing with the other 2 1/2 year olds. I apologize for the shakiness of the video. I'm no Stephen Spielberg! There is one more video to come. Seeing that it took me three days to get this one on here, I'm guessing it'll be up here by the middle of the week. Maybe?

Technical difficulties

For some reason I am having some problems uploading my videos. Urgh! I have spent way too much time trying to get it to work. I promise to keep working on it and get it figured out. I am sure it's just me and I am doing something wrong. So, to my faithful readers (all five of you!), the video will be up here some time in the near future.

Ella's first school recital

Yesterday we attended the Happy Hearts dinner at Ella's preschool. It's the big fundraiser event that her school has every year. There's a spaghetti dinner, a silent auction, and then all the children perform.

Okay, let me start off by saying that we almost didn't even go to this. I can't believe that we almost missed out on this amazing event in my child's life. Shame on me for almost missing it. Well, we had no idea that all of the kids were going to perform. We just thought it was a spaghetti dinner and a silent auction. Neither Chris or I are big fans of spaghetti and it's not like we need to be buying anything. So, there really was no reason to go. Until a couple of days ago when I got an email from Ella's school mentioning the kids would be singing. What!?! The kids are going to be singing! We were so going to be there. No way was I going to be missing this! Chris quickly changed his flight so that he would be able to go. (He actually almost didn't make it due to the bad weather we were having. He got there with about ten minutes to spare.) We called Mimi and Papa (that's my parents) and there was no way they were going to miss it either.

So, during the days leading up to event, Chris and I had pretty low expectations. We know that Ella is pretty quite at school and she gets a little scared around people she doesn't know. So, we figured that she would just stand up there and not really do much. Well, shame on me for not having higher expectations of my daughter. She way exceeded my expectations and then some. She was awesome! And I'm not just saying that because she's my daughter. Well...yes I am. I really was surprised and so were her teachers. She did so great. All the kids did a great job. I mean, what's not cute about a bunch of kids singing songs.

I know this is a little off topic but I was just looking at this picture and is it just me or is that little boy standing next to Ella really tall for a 3 year old! Wow, he's tall! He's not in her class so I don't know who he is. The four kids to the right of Ella are all her classmates.

And I don't want to forget sweet little Madeleine. She surprised us too. She was pretty attentive despite pouring raisins onto my parents laps every couple of minutes. But she definitely recognized Ella when she got up to sing and even yelled out "Ella" pronounced "A-ya".

Some of the items of the silent auction were created by the children at Ella's school. Each of the classes, created something that everyone could bid on. Ella's class made the following item. Ella's hand is on the 4. Someone bought it for $75.00.

It was such a great night. And for Chris to be there and my parents were able to to make it made it just that much more special. I've been sitting here for the past thirty minutes trying to fully capture in words how I felt about the night. I guess this is what being a parent is all about. To see your child up there - in front of all these people - singing her little heart out. My heart just filled with love and pride for my girl. It was just one of those great mommy moments and something that I will never forget.

So, you'll have to check back tomorrow to see Ella in action and see what songs she sang.