Jenna's Third Birthday!

We had a blast celebrating Jenna Alicia's third birthday. Because her actual birthday is May 11th, and because that was Mother's Day this year and because I am a bit selfish about sharing my Mother's Day with anyone, we celebrated the following Sunday so in effect she had a week-long event.

Here is some of the build up...

Her invitation made by Mommy

Here's a short video of Jenna sitting on the floor of our kitchen the day before her actual birthday and cutting apart a six pack of Diet Pepsi with her kiddie scissors. She is a Diet Pepsi freak which is of course severely curtailed by the fact that we give her about two sips of it every other week. What I love about this video is her intense concentration while she's working on this and how she looks up and smiles as if I'm going to take her picture about 6 seconds in, then realizes that no flash is going off so she returns to the task at hand.

Sorry that it's sideways. And so dark. I'm not very good at the whole video thing.

Despite our prayers for sunny and pleasant weather, we had a repeat of last year's rain and damp and cold-ness. We were packed into our house- a house filled with love!- but we are all family so it worked out just fine. As my Aunt Kathy jokingly said at the end, "We all know each other pretty well by now and get along...we know how to talk to each other." Which I thought was funny because she and my mom and dad have known each other for almost 45 YEARS.


Jenna picked out a kitty theme for her party, which featured pictures of kittens and a pink and green background which was both Spring-y and representational of Jenna's favorite colors. This was the centerpiece on the table.



We had just a regular old-fashioned backyard BBQ with hamburgers, hot dogs, pasta salad, fruit salad, veggies, chips and dip.









We had beautiful birthday cake from a real bakery provided by my parents (no supermarket cake for THEIR grandbaby!) and it was absolutely delicious. Jenna picked out vanilla cake with vanilla frosting and pink flowers on it. I could tell as soon as I cut into it that it was amazing... the cake was triple-layered and so dense and moist but not too heavy... heaven with butter cream frosting on top. Many thanks to my parents for getting this for us!








Then it was time for presents! Jenna made out like a bandit with everyone's generosity... beautiful clothes, fun toys, college money to put away, a promised trip to Toys R Us with her Grandpa (aka Paga), a few baby dolls (of course), some videos and the big gift from her godparents:

Jenna snuggles up with Bryan and Judy, her godparents

Jenna plays with her Rose Petal Cottage after a long day partying

Jenna scores another baby doll!

As you can see, Michaela "HELPED" with the gift opening. She had a tough time sharing the spotlight with her sister this year and wished she was getting some gifts, too. I told her to just wait 'til October and then it'll be all about her again for her 7th birthday.



We sent off our guests with little cupcakes made by Jenna and Mommy in bakery-type boxes : yellow cake with vanilla frosting and topped with pink sprinkles.



Here are some other pics from the afternoon:

Jenna and her cousin Olivia

Jenna and her Aunt Jaime and Aunt Michele

Jenna and her friend and godbrother Aidan

Many, many thanks to all who came to help us celebrate our little girl!!