Happy Birthday Tessa!!

Our Tessa Girl turned 5 today! She has been so excited for her birthday.

  

Tessa is such a spunky girl! She is full of life and energy. Boring is definitely not a word to describe Tess. She is always imagining and playing pretend. I love to listen to her play, she says such grown-up words and phrases that just crack me up.

  

Tessa is naturally generous. She would give the shirt off her back to anyone that needs it. Anytime she gets something, the first thing she does is share with her family, specifically her brothers. 

Tessa is very sweet with Damon. She loves to help him do the things he can't do himself yet. She is able to distract him when he wants something he can't have and make him happy when he's sad. Damon adores her and will always give her hugs.

Tessa loves that Rockwell will always let her play with him and his friends. He includes her like she's his best friend. Tessa loves to tell Rockwell about her day. She will tell me a couple things about school when I ask, but she gets really excited to talk to Rockwell about the things she's learning and doing.

  

Tessa loves stuffed animals, real animals, watching tv, playing outside, playing with Hallee, and preschool. She knows almost all her letters and their sounds and is interested in addition right now. 

Paul had a great idea to take Tessa to the Puppy Barn for her birthday. Al let Rockwell and Damon play at her house on Saturday while Paul and I took Tess and Hallee to pet the puppies. She was in heaven!

  

Tessa opened her presents Sunday afternoon. She was thrilled with her gifts.

  

  

I wrote this post earlier this afternoon and waited to publish it until I had pictures of her blowing out the candles on her pupcakes, as Tessa calls them. :) The pictures turned out even better than I was hoping, because some of the cupcakes are missing from the tower. Our neighbors, Steve and Chris, showed up right before we were going to have cake and ice cream. We visited with them for a while, and Tessa said she wanted to give them some pupcakes to take home. Steve went on and on about what a special girl she is for wanting to give to others on her special day. Their first response was to say no, that she didn't need to give any to them. I'm glad they took some when she said that she really wanted to share with them. Giving makes Tessa happy. It's one of the many many things I love about her.


Happy birthday beautiful Tessa girl. We love you so much!!

Around Our House

The weather has been perfect for playing outside lately. We are loving it.

  

Tessa and Damon like to make snow angels in all the leaves on the tramp.

  

We went for a walk on the Provo River Trail with Al and her kids over fall break. It is beautiful there!

The kids loved climbing down to the river and throwing rocks into the water.

I had a horrible headache that day, and so Al was super sweet and took Rockwell and Tessa to her house to play while Damon and I went home and napped. 

Paul took Tessa with him to the marching band competition last Saturday. She loved that one-on-one time with Dad. He took her to get a donut afterward, and she loved that too. :)

  

The kids and I painted pumpkins for the porch.

We had Katie and Ben, and Al and Keith over for a fire and games one night. We played Family Feud and laughed so hard we were all crying. 

We all love it when Paul reads books at bedtime. 

He does voices for the characters and we all think it's hilarious.

Rockwell's friend Tayvin came over to play one day after school last week. Eden knocked on the door asking if she could play too. They had so much fun playing all sorts of things inside and outside. Damon was so sad that he couldn't go jump on the tramp with all the big kids. I opened the window for him and the kids were so sweet to keep coming and talking to him so he felt like he wasn't forgotten.  

Damon and I went with Tessa on her field trip to the Art Museum at BYU today. They got to look at some paintings while learning about gratitude, and then do a couple art projects.

Halloween

This year we had Spiderman,

Minnie Mouse,

and a Ninja Turtle.

Tessa got to wear a costume to preschool on Monday, and the kids sang Halloween songs on Miss Roxi's porch for the parents. That was adorable! She decided to be Ariel that day.

She was so sweet when she got home from school. The first thing she did was take out all the treats she got from her friends, and decide which one each of us in the family would like most. She set those aside for all of us. She's such a generous girl.

Paul's costume was a big hit this year. 

People are always saying his name is just like Paul Blart, and the students at his school have been calling him the Hall Cop for years. They even made a meme last year with his face on the cover of the Mall Cop movie. Everyone at the school loved his costume and took pictures of and with him all day. He's such a good sport.

  

Rockwell had a costume parade at school. And I had to take a picture of him with his Spiderman mask actually on. He has wanted to wear it so badly both years but it drives him crazy. He likes to at least look at the picture of the whole costume though.

  

We had mummies, pumpkins, witch fingers, and ghosts for dinner. 

I love how all three kids struck a pose in this picture when we just asked them to smile. :)

We had fun trick-or-treating. There was a very loud dog behind a fence that scared Damon pretty good. When the dog barked at us, Damon started screaming and ran away. When he calmed down enough to talk he just kept saying that he didn't want the dog to bite his bum bum. Haha! He talked about that the rest of the night. Funny kid.