3 Years of Kalea

 This is Kalea showing off her birthday ensemble... oh what, you wanted to see her face? Pssshhh!

I cannot believe my baby is 3?! The time most definitely flies with this kid.

Kalea has done a great job of filling the last 3yrs with all sorts of excitement, laughter and joy along with a few moments of complete chaos and bewilderment- c'mon I'm not gonna sugar coat it!

Sometimes I look at her and wonder how in the world we wound up together, I'm grateful we did,

but really, whose funny idea was this?

It's good to have a sense of humor about parenting her that is for sure, if I didn't we'd have major problems. She's taught me more patience in 3yrs than I had learned in the 24yrs before I had her.

She's also helped me learn to throw caution to the wind a little more, be more carefree, watch way more Disney movies/cartoons than I ever intended to, laugh louder, cry really hard to get my way... She's also taught me to be in the moment, let go of a lot of my pretenses and just be me.

Kalea has funny little ways that she let's me know we're doing good, like when I put her in the car

the other day and she said "Thanks Mom, you're my best friend!"

Nothing feels better than hearing that, even though she's 3 and can't fully comprehend it.

I know there will be times when she's a teenager that I will need to hear that and it won't come out of her mouth, so I'm clinging to it every time she says it now!

We are pretty good friends though, and as hectic and crazy as our life together gets sometimes, it is definitely a riot being her mom.

I love that I have so many hilarious memories to look back on, and the pictures to go with them. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but with her a thousand would never be enough to fully explain.

Kalea's birthday this year also fell on the weekend of our nephew's baptism, so it was her first time having all her cousins around for a party. She really had a lot of fun with them, I don't even know if she actually ate any of her food besides the sugar laden stuff that day!

We had so much fun visiting and eating and trying to keep the kids from scarfing all of the yummy cookies.You could tell they all had way too much sugar, but it was so worth it, they were so happy!

I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised with myself for this birthday. I am usually such a procrastinator, but this year I had a timeline leading up to the day and for the most part I followed it,

and, big shocker here, the day went so much smoother! Thanks to my Mom, MIL and SIL for helping with some of the food too, it was nice to be able to delegate a few things out into very capable hands.

Haha, except for the fact that I forgot icing for the cupcakes- but we had tons of other food so that was a minor oops... although now I feel like I really should light a candle for Kalea to blow out- better late than never...

While we were tidying up inside I found 3 little rascals that had wandered out. I think they may have wanted to jump some more, but we were done with that activity, so they grabbed a book and hung out for a bit. Too funny. In these pictures they were all saying "CHEESE!" in unison, in one of the highest pitches you can imagine.

Kalea and Rex are probably 2 of the strongest 3yr olds you will ever encounter.

This is them battling a bit for the bike, earlier in the day they had a tug of war with a skipping rope and I thought Rex was going to fly off the top of the slide.

They were dead even in strength, which was pretty fun to watch.

I'm glad Kalea has so many cousins so close to her age,

it makes watching them grow up so much fun!

I love how neither of them would look straight into the camera for me.

All in all we had a really great celebration of the life of a very awesome, spunky, spirited, curious, energetic, fun, sweet, smart, sassy 3 YEAR OLD KALEA!

Brynlee telling me what's up, or showing me that she's "One!" hopefully she'll have "Two!" figured out by November... only a few more months until the next party!