Makelle Turns 4!

Makelle's birthday still isn't until the end of the week on Saturday, but we celebrated a little early this year with a family dinner for her and her Uncle Tyler at my parents' house on Sunday.  I went completely overboard and much to Caleb's dismay bought her a GIANT dollhouse that I found for a steal of a deal on KSL.  Caleb was a little mortified by the sheer size of the thing, but since we will be moving to a much larger house with plenty of space in a few short weeks, I think it is perfect.  As does Makelle:

 

Rather than showing a lot of emotion when she is really excited about things, Makelle often gets really timid and her little hands always go to her face when she is really happy, really mad, really sad or really scared.  We are assuming it was really happy this time :)

We won't tell him when he is older, but I think Seth was even more excited about the giant dollhouse than Makelle.  He had his little horse and action figure running up and down the stairs continuously most of the afternoon.

Makelle also got a lot of fun new dress up clothes from her Grandma and Grandpa Lloyd and cute owl blanket/costume from her cousins. Let's just say we have yet to see her in normal clothing since Sunday:

(Being a "Married Girl")

(Being Strawberry Shortcake)

My brother's family gave us a book of kids' cake designs awhile back and Makelle has been leafing through it the past few weeks trying to decide what kind of cake she wanted this year.  She couldn't decide between a pink flower and a Barbie doll cake.  Loving a good theme I tried pointing her towards the Barbie cake to go with her Barbie dollhouse, without giving anything away and finally won her over when she realized that we could make the doll's dress any color, not just the blue in the picture.  In the end she requested a 'Princess Pink' cake.  (Princess Pink is the imaginary character that appears in all the bedtime stories that Caleb tells Makelle at night.)  And this is what we came up with:

Makelle helped me bake and decorate the cake.  She insisted upon wearing her own real apron and pulled up a chair and sat watching it cook for a solid 30 minutes while she absently brushed her doll's hair. I am pretty sure she was switched at birth, because her interests are NOTHING like mine!  But despite the pink obsession, refusal to wear pants and love of all things domestic, I couldn't love her more!

Little Figure Skater

Makelle really wanted to take dance lessons.  I really didn't want Makelle to take dance lessons... sitting through all those recitals is going to be brutal :)  So, for now I convinced her to at least wait until we moved and she could get into a more permanent class.  While she patiently awaited her much anticipated dance class we appeased her with some figure skating lessons from the local rec center.  In the 3-5 year old class it was less figure skating and more 'not falling over' but she LOVED it!  And is determined to stick with it until she learns how to do spins 'like the big girls.'

Day one she couldn't even stand up on the ice without falling and once she fell, she could not, for the life of her, get back up... every effort to do so resulted in doing the splits with her hands on the ice and her bum in the air.

(My camera settings got messed up and it is super blurry, but you get the idea.)

Five lessons later and now she can move around with little marching steps forward and backward without falling and without the use of the walker:

And her favorite part was beginning to learn how to spin:

Looks just like the professionals, right?  :)

The Littlest Nursery Boy

The week after Makelle left nursery to start Sunbeams, Seth hit 18 months and got to start nursery. I have been teaching primary since before he was born, so Caleb has spent the last 18 months taking care of him during church and was quite excited that he was now old enough to start going to nursery. Old enough, but not necessarily big enough. We've been to several specialists, but have yet been able to figure out why our little man is so little, so at a whopping 18 pounds we were glad that he at least had to wait until the bigger three-year-olds moved on before he started going.

The first week we took him, he was obviously excited to see all the toys and started playing right away. Then from the hall you could hear the exact moment he realized that we had snuck out without him and he burst into tears. When we picked him up the nursery leaders said he was too cute and little and they felt bad making him calm down on his own, so they took turns holding him and comforting him most of the time.

Since then he cries and tries to escape every time we get close to the room, but he settles down and starts playing pretty quick these days and does just fine. He definitely looks tiny compared to everyone else, but it is fun to see him get older and conquer new things.

Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam

Makelle FINALLY got to start Sunbeams this year. Last year all the little friends in nursery that she played with started without her and she was quite sad. In fact in December they start bringing the kids into part of Sharing time so that they can get used to it and last year they brought Makelle along for a few weeks before I discovered it and had to inform them that her birthday wasn't until after the new year and it was devastating to have gotten her hopes up. I took her to the bathroom and asked her if she was having fun in nursery and what she was doing and she said, "nothing, just waiting for the big kids to get back to play with me." It was rather sad. So after a mere 12 months of waiting she finally got her turn and LOVES primary.


She has thee best teacher ever, so I think that helps :) I thought I was being released as the Sunbeams teacher, but there are about 18 kids on the roll this year so they decided at the last minute to split the class and asked me to keep teaching for a few weeks until they found a second replacement as well. So until we move I get to hang out with sweet Makelle in primary, which is fun to see her smiling non-stop and so proud of herself that she is with all the big kids. We set New Year's goals and Makelle suffers from being EXTREMELY shy, so she decided to help overcome that she wanted to try and raise her hand and answer at least one question every week in primary. So far she is doing really well, she is very soft spoken when she talks and always brings her hands up to her mouth the entire time so you can't always understand her the best, but we are proud of her for pushing herself to get better. She is so precious!