Birthday Fun!

We've been getting ready for Emma's transition out of Early Intervention Birth to 3 for a while and completed that with her first day of school last week.  All the change was quite stressful for me and I just kept focusing on Emma and thinking about how lucky I am to be her Mommy and I wanted to make her birthday special for her.

Since she LOVES being with people we celebrated this milestone with a party that included great friends, face painting, pumpkin painting, cake and good food.  The day was picture perfect so the party was mostly held outside, which was very welcome after all the rain we have had cooped us all up inside for a while.  Not to mention the fact that our house is small and getting outside gave the kids more opportunity to spread out and have fun!



I want to take a moment to talk about the gifts Emma received.  We usually don't focus on presents at birthdays since it is a celebration of life and not of presents.  But, this year Emma received some amazing presents!  I mention this simply because Emma can be a bit hard to buy for with her motor challenges but this year EVERY SINGLE present was just perfect for her!  If you are interested in ideas for presents for children like Emma, here are some that really hit the mark:

• a large musical keyboard with buttons that have different tempos and keys that you can bang on use to make beautiful music
• plush turtle constellation nightlight like the one found here.  Julia even loves this one and keeps trying to take into her bed at night, so I think that means Emma won't grow out of this anytime soon.  She is sleeping a bit better at night so far since I put this in her room and I hope this could be the reason and we all start to get a bit more sleep around here!
• leg warmers.  We used these the day of the party and every day since!  They are perfect for keeping her little legs warm since she always tends to be a bit colder than other children and they are awesome for potty training!
• a remote control car.  That is, if she can wrestle it off of the other people in the house since we all like this one.
• an outfit for Emma and a doll with a matching outfit.  adorable :-)
• iTunes gift cards.  This will let us have lots more fun getting apps for her iPad.
• a crawler so she can move herself around a bit.  She actually got this a month early and LOVES it. I'll do a separate post on this soon.

I could go on but you get the idea.  It seems like buying presents for Emma was no problem at all.

Happy Birthday my sweet little Emma!  You have lost every inch of your baby look and are now pure girl.  Our lovely little girl that brings so much joy to our lives.  Thank you for being you!

If you want to see a slideshow I put together of Emma's year in photos, click below.