Birthday Week at the Havlir House

Dear Kids, 

The last shall be first and the first shall be last. So Hailey, you are our last, so I'll share about your week first. Today is your official 1st birthday. You've survived our care for 365 days and girl, these 365 days flew by at light speed. 

For your birthday, we celebrated with a chicken party. You love chickens and puppies when you see them in books. You can eat chicken, so because 1st birthdays are just as much for the family as it is for the child, we combined our love for food and your love for chickens and hosted a chicken iron chef style party.. Each of the families brought a chicken dish to get judged by the big kids. 

And at the end, we all had chicken cakes...and no chickens were involved in the making of said cakes. 

We started to sing happy birthday and quickly you realized that you were the center of attention. At that moment your face just lit up. 

Photo Credit: C. Vaughan 

You probably enjoyed your cake more than Nathan or Hannah did. Your frosting was mostly whipped cream, so I pretty much let you have as much as you want...until you started to fling cake around. 

 The families brought chicken fried rice, chicken pockets (Nathan's favorite food ever), chicken bbq pizza and we made chicken lettuce wraps.

Photo Credit: A. Lemon

So after the kids all tasted the dishes and marked their scoring sheets with the appropriate emoji, Nathan got to work and started calculating the score to see who brought the best dish. Surprise surprise, it was chicken pockets (AKA Chicken thunder). 

So Hailey is still not sleeping through the night [sigh], which reminds me that I need to savor these last few weeks of night snuggles. Hailey is starting to be more confident with standing and cruising, especially if there are puffs set up to encourage you to move. As you can see, Teddy approves this training. 

 I snapped this picture tonight because I'm just so proud of you. You have the cutest tricks right now: Dance, horsey ride, clap your hands, shake your head "no", and splash splash. You can say nai nai, which means milk, and you sometimes will say Mama. You point to what you want and you love to look at books. It seems like you know the routine at night. I'll finish nursing you and then you'll point to the books. I'll read you a few books, and put your sleep sack on. You then point to the door. I walk you out to say goodnight to the rest of the family and then we go back to your room. You point at the sheep painting in your room, we count to 3 and then you turn off the light. I will sing a lullaby and then put you down for the night. You've been sleeping for 30 minutes to 3 hours before you wake up crying.

This is such a fun age. You are excited about everything and you are able to go with the flow.

Dear Nathan, 

2 days ago, you turned 6. A few days before that, we invited 2 of your school friends out to lunch and play. First we had bbq nachos and cake. 

 Then we went to epic fun to play some games. Bowling,

 Bumper cars,

 Even the babies had some fun.

 On your actual birthday, I made your favorite dish: Chicken Thunders. In the picture below, there is 1.5 chicken thunders. That day, you ate almost 3. You sure love it!

 At 6 years old, you are still the sweet and thoughtful kid that you've always been; however, you are starting to realize that life is unfair and this has made you slightly vengeful. We are trying our best to help instill more kindness and forgiveness into you. It's tough, so if anyone has tips on how to do so, please let me know.

You lost your second tooth tonight. Those teeth are just so small. We'll see how much the tooth fairy will leave under your pillow.

El Tigre visits us from Tiger's class.

 This week was the perfect week for El Tigre to visit. He had a chance to celebrate with us.

El Tigre went with us to HEB and enjoyed sitting up front. 

 When they earned buddy bucks, he was so lucky to stop the wheel at "Instant winner"

El Tigre even went on a bike ride with Hannah and Daddy. 

This past weekend was also the mid-harvest moon festival. Chinese tradition is to grill and eat moon cakes. So, we grilled...

 and ate moon cakes.

 Hailey even joined in on the fun.

 This has been a super busy week for me. On top of my regular mom duties, I also clocked in about 30 hours of work after hours and that is not even counting all of the help that you all have been giving me.

(On a side note, Nathan helped me assemble some organizational baskets that I got for the pantry.)

 Hailey helped me separate name tag holders,

 and throw away scraps of paper.

 While Nathan and Hannah helped me assemble name tags.

It's been an emotional week with birthdays and getting ready for the first mentoring day of the year. I'm looking forward to having some fun with ya'll in the next few days. I am so blessed to be able to be a mostly stay at home mom. Just the few hours I had away from you guys really made me miss being with you guys. You all are my heart and I love you so much! 

Love, 

Mommy