The Beginning of Busy...

March has arrived and with it the beginning of busy weekends for the O’Dell family. Spring brings us into what we call “birthday season” at our house, and two weekends ago was the start of it. The girls had a fabulous time at Nathan’s 2nd birthday party. There was a play area with slides and climbing rope “things”. Tori thoroughly enjoyed the slides, and Emmalee enjoyed all aspects of the play area, especially having Stella tag along. She talked about Stella Bella (or Stelli) for a good part of the day, and Tori, referring to her as Lella, kept thinking we were going somewhere else that Stella would be. It was fantastic to see our friends, and we are so happy we were invited to celebrate Nathan’s big day!


Here Emmalee and Tori are enjoying the party!

After we left the party, we stopped by Alyssa and Landon’s house for a “mini play date,” as Emmalee called it. She had so much fun playing with Alyssa and was quite unhappy with me for making her leave “way too soon!” Tori loved seeing Landon. She is infatuated with babies and kept saying “Hi baby” to him. While I am sure he didn’t find it as amusing as she did, he was a very good sport. Emmalee has already checked her calendar and is ready to schedule another “longer” play date.

Once we left there we went Easter dress shopping. I had already picked out a dress for Tori on a previous shopping trip, but I left Emmalee choose her own-of course, I guided her toward the ones I really liked. Convincing her to get the one I really wanted was as easy as telling her that the one she chose wasn’t as “fancy” as Tori’s. It was all over after that! I am not proud of my parenting tactics, but the pictures will be fabulous!

Here are the girls doing a little coloring on our semi-calm Sunday

Sunday was a bit calmer, after a night of strong storms and no electricity Sunday morning. After returning from church we read lots of books for Emmalee’s quest for a free pizza from the Book-It program. Emmalee is really working hard on her reading skills and is trying to go beyond the basic sight word type books she reads at school. It is amazing to me how she went from completely disinterested to wanting to read Fancy Nancy books overnight. She was not amused by Tori’s antics during her reading time and simply “couldn’t concentrate.” We managed to get through 8 books for Emmalee alone, along with the same two books for Tori over and over. I won’t complain, as it is my dream for both girls to love reading as much as I do!

Another fun snapshot of Tori being the "baby" and Emmalee being the "mommy."