Lilly Anne is 7!

This beautiful, loving, thoughtful & bright girl is 7 years old today!  I can't believe every time another year ticks by for each of our children, but am even more amazed how much they grow and change in just one year.

In just 3 short months of homeschooling, it has been my pleasure and delight to see Lilly thrive and love learning.  Last year in Kindergarten, I could tell she would come home tired and though she loved school, she often would seem overwhelmed even though the work was easy for her.  I think both Sean and Lilly just needed more sleep in the mornings, and more opportunities to release energy throughout the day.  Those 2 factors have seemed to help them tremendously, and they have been able to focus their learning specifically to their needs.  It is definitely overwhelming and challenging for me to have them all home, but I am constantly reminded that we made the best decision for our family.

Lilly is always smiling, caring for her little brothers, and helping me around the house.  She is not a "girly girl" but has her own unique tastes that are more classic, and sporty in nature.  She loves riding her bike, learning to jump rope, puzzles, scrabble, reading, and arts & crafts.  She is learning to play the piano and has quite the natural talent for learning music.  I hope to spend more time working with her over this year as we are still figuring out how our homeschool schedule works best.  We definitely have time for more non-academic areas as Lilly is already over half way through with her language arts curriculum and is 10 lessons away from half way through with her first grade math curriculum.  We haven't necessarily been doing a lot extra, but have been doing each of those lessons every day and she works through what she can in a reasonable amount of time.

Since she and Sean recently fell in love with the game Scrabble, we decided to make it the theme for her birthday.  Here are a few of our decorations from her party:

I spent an insane amount of time making little square sugar cookies to decorate her cake with and to have as an activity for the kids to write the letters of their names on them with icing.

One batch ended up making around 150 cookies

They expanded more than I thought they would and I ended up having to trim the edges a 2nd time after cooking....good thing she's worth the effort!

It ended up being much harder than I expected to try to figure out the scale of the cake to the starburst candy and the cookies...and this is the best I could do!  And, Sean tells me after I did all this, "Mommy, the first word is supposed to start in the center over the star!"  duh....oh, well!

 Jon and I also spent way too much time cutting out these squares to make a table-sized scrabble game...

 At least a few of the kids tried to play it!  Most of the kids were just enjoying playing outside or in the play room.  We saved the pieces to use later for a family game night.

I had to laugh and take this pic, because at one point, most of the men had wandered out to the woods...I guess discussing manly things, lol.  Turns out, Jon said they were figuring out zip line designs for their backyards and the math/engineering behind figuring out the weight bearing loads along the line....um, over my head!

Square plates to coordinate with the theme...

 She was blessed to have several of her friends come to her party, and we were so thankful for everyone who took the time to come celebrate with her.  Love our family and friends!

 I was too late to get a pic of her blowing out the candles.  By the time I walked around her to get a better view, she had blown them out

 I didn't get many pics of her opening presents, and instead of keeping Luke from eating wrapping paper, I should have been making sure Lilly kept cards ordered with the presents because the forgot who half of them belonged with and now it will be hard to write thank you notes....

 Our menu chalkboard in the kitchen decorated for the day

What a fun day!  It is usually our family tradition to go get Krispy Kreme doughnuts on each kids' actual birthday, but after all the sugar they had yesterday, I suggested Chick fil a instead.  So, we all piled into the van in our pj's to go through the drive through this morning!  Always a treat!

 Sean didn't want to stop eating for a picture, lol