Ashlyn's 4th Birthday!

Ashlyn has been very excited for her birthday to get here (although wasn't really too excited when she got a lot of phone calls and became center of attention...she's pretty shy but felt special after the fact).  She's always been told that her birthday comes after Christmas so she's been asking every day after Dec. 25th if it's her birthday yet.  Her day finally came and she requested her favorite breakfast...chocolate chip banana pancakes:

After breakfast we headed over to eat where both kids pick for their birthdays every year...Chuck E. Cheese!  The kids were pretty excited and hyper:

The place was pretty empty and there were no birthday parties going on.  Perfect for us!!

After eating at Chuck E. Cheese, we headed home where I put the icing on Ashlyn's birthday cake.  I've enjoyed making the kids their birthday cakes every year, but this cake turned out being the easiest and my favorite:

Ashlyn seemed pretty happy with it too:

These kids were very excited to cut into it!:

Present time!!

Thank you, family!  She loved every gift and card that she opened!!

After getting their fill of running back and forth through the curtain of streamers Zane and I hung up last night, we headed to Ashlyn's birthday dinner of choice.

McDonald's!!  The birthday girl even got to choose chocolate milk as her drink!  :)

And Daddy just might have ordered them another dessert for the day...

 We loved celebrating our big 4 year old girl today!!!

Ashlyn is 4 years old!!

Ashlyn Makylee Porter
December 31, 2007
8:42 am
7lbs 11oz
20 1/2 inches



1 year old:



2 years old:


3 years old:


4 years old:
Birthday breakfast:

Cookies, Golfing, and Chipmunks!

We have been loving all the time we've spent together this week!  Zane and Bryson go back to school on Tuesday so we're trying to cram as much fun in as we can.  The day after Christmas, Ashlyn and I had a Mommy/Daughter baking afternoon.  We made Daddy's favorite cream cheese cookies (for the second time this Christmas) and some of my favorite oatmeal/M & M cookies.  The kids like anything so this was the fair thing to do.  :)

Ashlyn is getting so big!  Not only does she love vacuuming, but she loves washing dishes too.  She's my amazing little helper!

And she insisted that Daddy would want his cookies to be blue this time instead of green...so blue they were!

Yum!!

What could the boys have possibly been doing while we were baking???  They left to go use Bryson's new set of golf clubs, of course!!  Saying that Bryson was excited was a complete understatement!  He could not contain his excitement and couldn't believe that he was going to a real golf course with his Daddy!

I'm so happy that Zane took pictures for me while they were out playing!

Zane was paying to play and I know Bryson's attention span can be short and he wouldn't last long on the golf course, so I told Zane that he could call me to come pick Bryson up when the excitement wore off and he got cranky/restless.  I assumed Bryson would last an hour...if that.  I was completely shocked when the boys came walking through the door 4 hours later!  Bryson played the whole 18 holes with Zane!

 Time to head home for dinner!

Zane and I still talk about how amazed we are that Bryson was so well behaved for such a long period of time!  And I know Bryson had a blast because he hasn't quit talking about it since!  He even announced tonight that I need to let everyone know that he's changed his name to Tiger Woods and people need to start calling him that (Zane told him that he should at least go with the name Rory McIlroy).  :)

We had one more surprise activity planned for the kids this week.  Tuesday we took them to the movies to see Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.  They loved it and are still talking about their favorite parts.  This was a special time for them because we don't go to the movie theater often.  It was fun to hear Ashlyn laugh at parts and Bryson was so excited he literally bounced in his chair throughout the movie.

I'm so glad we get to enjoy our Christmas break together and I'm happy we still have a few days left before school starts again!