Three years!

Can you believe that this itty-bitty...

...turned THREE this past Tuesday?

Yeah.

When did that happen again?

The official party isn't until this Saturday, so on Tuesday, we went to lunch at Jason's, then to the Greensboro Children's Museum (which was great, except for all the daycare/daycamp groups that were being allow to run amok with ZERO supervision).

She had a really fun time at the museum.  She went shopping in the market:

Look, mom -- an artichoke!

played receptionist:  

and read with Daddy (although that didn't last more than a couple of pages...way more exciting things to do).

After dinner at Elizabeth's (birthday girl's choice), we went over to Grandma and Pop's house for cake and the ever-important birthday song.

All in all, a happy day for a happy kid.

Flag cake!

Hey, why don't you go check out my Fourth of July flag cake over on my baking blog?

Fourth of July balloon wreath

So I saw this idea for a balloon wreath awhile back on Pinterest, and thought it was cute.  Since July 4th was coming up, I decided to try it out with a red, white, and blue theme.

You need a straw wreath form (but don't unwrap it), greening pins, which are these things:

You can find these in the "Floral Accessories" section at Michael's.

and a crapload of balloons.

Bag o' balloons.

I bought 3 bags of 72 each, which was more than I needed, but since I needed one bag of each color, that was my best option.

Once you have all your stuff, take a balloon and a greening pin.  Wrap the balloon around the middle of the pin, kind of like this:

Then stick the pin in the wreath.

Do this a lot, basically until your wreath is as full as you want it, or until you're out of balloons.

When you're done, you'll end up with something that looks like this:

See the reflection of our flag in the middle of the wreath?  You like how I did that, don't you?

Pretty cute, huh?  It was a little time consuming jamming all those balloons on there, but it was super-easy to do, and if your kids are a bit older than Ella, they can help out, too.  (The pins are a little sharp, though.)

You can see the original birthday balloon wreath here.