Eliana's 6th birthday

Can you believe our big girl is 6 years old?  She continues to grow before our eyes.  At her check up, she was 48in tall (90th percentile!!) and weighed 50lbs (75th percentile). Her latest desire is to become an artist when she grows up. She loves to draw and paint, and can go through a blank pad of paper in just a few days.  She mostly gets along well with her brother when it is just the two of them, but she fights with and excludes him if she has any friends over her own age.  She likes to play "homeschool" with her siblings where she is the teacher and Will and Laney are the students.  They do things like have coloring time, snack time, or recess.  Sometimes they even have Spanish homeschool where Teo, our nanny, is the teacher.  Will and Laney seem to love it, and follow her around doing as she wishes.  Her favorite foods are chocolate and ice cream.

For her actual birthday, we had a small celebration at home with chocolate cupcakes.  The next day, she had three friends over for a "drop off" party (meaning her friends' parents didn't stay). I'm not exactly sure what the girls did.  They played in Eliana's room with the door shut, and I heard lots of giggling and talking.  At one point when we were having pizza for dinner, they all started telling jokes.  It seems like they quickly ran out of real jokes that they know (How does the ocean say hello? It waves!) and deteriorated into poop jokes (Why did the poop cross the road? Poopy!).  Why do kids think poop is the funniest word ever? I feel like this was party was very reflective of what I have to look forward to for the next several years.  Eliana ended the party with giving out goody bags (she even made one for her brother with a lizard in it).  This is apparently the most important part of any birthday party.

I love that big girl of mine.  She knows how to push my buttons the most, but she can also be the sweetest little girl.  We are so blessed that God gave her to us 6 years ago.

Celebrating with family.

Messy Laney loves her chocolate cupcake.

How selfies usually end up...

This picture is actually of a Christmas, not birthday, present, but I feel is represents well how much Eliana has grown. She got a K'nex set for Christmas which I wasn't sure how much she would be able use or enjoy.  However, she understood how it worked right away!  I don't know why this surprised me so much.  She's very smart.  I guess she is just my oldest and I don't realize how much she is growing up. But she understood the directions and with very little help was able to quickly build anything in the instruction book.

Eliana's finished Eiffel Tower, mere seconds before William tipped it over and tried to break it. (The hardest part of this present is keeping her little siblings from ruining/eating what she is working on.)