Birthday Girl

My "little" girl has finally turned 3!  (I use quotes around that because this girl is actually very tall for her age.  I've had people assuming she was 3 within days of her turning two last year.  We'll see how long it'll be until I get people asking if she's 4.  For those curious, she's 40 inches tall :)

We had a good day overall.  Unfortunately I was sick with a cold that day, so I didn't get to do as much with her as I had originally planned.  But we still had fun with what we did.

In the late morning, I finally felt like I had the energy to take Ann on a little outing.  So even though it was overcast, cool and windy, we headed over to Quarry Hill.

We saw a duck by the pond (no geese this time).  There were lots of birds swooping around the pond too.

Hugging mom during the really big gusts of wind.

She loves to run around this pavilion next to the pond, and enjoys getting drinks of water from the water fountain.

Sitting on a bench watching the duck and the little waterfall/fountain nearby.

After a while we decided to go inside the nature center to get out of the wind.  Ann had fun looking at the animals inside, as well as trying out all of the binoculars set out

There are these good sized rocks right next to the parking lot and Ann had fun climbing over them before we headed home.  After I took these pictures, a man who had just arrived at the park saw me and commented he had the same picture of his son from 20 years ago - "different rock and different park, but same picture. It's a nice one."

I asked Ann to show me how old she was now!  (When I first woke her up that morning, one of the first things she said was "I three now!"...followed up by a request to go and blow out of her birthday candles.  She was disappointed that we'd have to wait until later to do that.)

That evening we invited my parents over to be with us as we opened Ann's present and ate cake.  She got a new dress from my parents.

She also got some new clothes from Grandma and Grandpa Polley

She wanted to put her new skort on immediately

Opening the blanket wrapped present (you can see it sitting next to me in the pictures above).  The blanket thing is a bit of a random tradition with Tom and me.  It started when we were engaged and Tom gave me my birthday present wrapped up in this blanket.  So we've often just wrapped each other's birthday gifts up in the blanket instead of bothering with wrapping paper.

It was a new, bigger ball.  She has really enjoyed having that ball to play with.

Pregnant mommy.  I definitely look different than I did for her birthday last year :)

Getting ready to finally blow out her candles!  We carved her cake to look like the number 3.  That was something that Tom's mom would do for him and his siblings when they were young.  Tom suggested we do it for Ann because she loves numbers and would obviously love having a big 3 shaped cake (he was correct, and she did, in fact, love it).

Blowing out the candles

Pointing to the smoke after blowing the candles out

She loved the sprinkles I put on her cake.  She wanted to just pick some off and eat those first before actually eating the cake.

I hung up streamers above our dining room table as well as in the doorway between the dining room and kitchen.  Ann often requested to be picked up and walked in and out of the doorway to go through the streamers :)