My sweet Camryn Olivia turned 4 years last week! Sometimes she asks me how many months she is (because Lily is still young enough to be X many months old, instead of years), so I told her 48 months. That’s a lot of months!
I wanted to write a little bit about her at this stage of her life.
- She prefers to be called Camryn now, if you ask her. But a lot of people still call her Camy. I usually call her Cam or Cam-boo or Camryn. Now that she knows how to write her name, she saw someone write it Camy and she thought they had just spelled her name wrong! :)
- She’s a lightweight. I am taking her to her 4 year old well check up tomorrow but I would be surprised if she weighed more than 32 lbs. She keeps asking for a big girl car seat like Avery but it will be quite a while before she is 40 lbs! She’s also kind of short for her age, which is different for us because Avery (and now Lily too) has always been pretty tall for her age.
- She is a picky eater, which partly contributes to her lightweight status! She has a list of probably 30 foods that she eats and rarely adds to that list (unless it’s a new treat, those are usually fun to try). She likes strawberries, cantaloupe, watermelon, carrots, apples, pears, sometimes bananas, hot dogs, sometimes chicken nuggets, and the rest of her diet is mostly carbs. We’re working on it though! If she tries 10 new foods, she gets to go to Chuck E. Cheese with her BFF. She’s tried 4 and we’ve been working on it for about 2 months!
- She loves to sing. We got a CD from her Primary class that has all of the songs they are learning this year on it and she asks me to put it on for her almost every day. She’ll just stand there and sing along for quite a while.
- She knows her letters and is slowly learning how to write and draw. She’s pretty good at counting. Probably much better than Avery was at this age since she’s been around while we’ve been teaching Avery. The other day in the car Avery and Camryn counted back and forth all the way to 100, just for fun.
- She’s a smart girl. She loves talking about what day of the week it is (Tuesday is her favorite day – it’s when she has preschool), loves checking her clothes to see what size they are (and is so proud of herself when she fits into something 4T!), and is always asking me questions. She loves checking off to-do lists too.
- Camryn is not scared of dogs, like Avery is, but we recently took her swimming and she was really freaked out by that. Time to get her in swimming lessons! Sometimes she surprises me with how brave she is and other times she puts on this super shy face. One of my friends described her shy face by saying, “Sometimes I’m afraid if I talk to her she’s just going to melt!” :)
- She is my good helper, has definitely learned how to be a good big sister over the past 8 months since Lily was born. And she loves playing with Avery. It’s a long 8 hours for us when Avery is at school every day!
Well that’s my Camryn right now. She had a lovely birthday and when I asked her what she wanted to do on her birthday, she said, “Turn 4!” She is so proud to be four years old.
Today was Camryn’s much anticipated Minnie Mouse birthday party! Her birthday is Monday but Avery had the day off of school today so I thought it worked out nicely to do it today.
I’ve spent the last week or so getting things ready and we had a really fun time. There were 8 kids ages 2-5 and Merrick was kind enough to come home during his lunch break to be my helper. :)
So here are some pictures I took of the decorations before the kids arrived.
I bought black plates and taped on some black cardstock to make them look like Mickey ears. Each kid got Minnie or Mickey ears that I made and a cup that they got to take home and re-use.
I made chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and used regular and mini Oreos to make the Minnie head shape. I just piped on the bows as best I could. I was thinking of making little mini fondant bows but I’m glad I didn’t. These took 30 seconds to pipe on and they looked just fine.
Here’s a little banner I made up with some extra materials I had.
Then I took a round platter and a round plate outside and made these chalk Mickey heads all over the driveway for the kids to color in when we were done. Easy.
I forgot to take pictures of all the goody bags I made up but here’s one of the girls ones. The boys were red and just had a Mickey head with no bow. Simple and cute!
Oh and here is the invitation I made (with the bottom cropped off so you don’t all see my address!)
So then the party began with coloring Minnie coloring pages. Apparently my girls are the only ones interested in coloring. All the other kids just scribbled for 10 seconds and said they were done, haha!
Then we played Pin the Bow on Minnie. I just painted this big Minnie head on some purple cardboard I had and cut out pink bows for them to stick on. It was pretty fun actually.
Then we played “Minnie Says” and then we did a little scavenger hunt. I hid all these 2” Mickey heads I cut out all over the room and I just had them find them all. They seemed to like it and it was super easy.
We served a little lunch for the kids. I got Mickey shaped chicken nuggets from Costco, “Bow”tie pasta with alfredo sauce, and all of Camryn’s favorite fruits – cantaloupe, green apples, and strawberries. Oh and I randomly found these Minnie sugar cookies marketed as Easter cookies. I kinda had to get them.
Anyways the kids ate really quietly and really well! It was great!
Then we played musical carpet squares to the “Minnies Bowtoons” theme song, and decorated some Mickey Mouse shaped wands with stickers and glitter glue.
The kids really just wanted the cupcakes, though. :)
After that it was presents and that was pretty intense! We had to hurry the kids outside after that to enjoy the beautiful 65 degree day and color in those chalk Mickeys.
It was a fun hour and a half! But I’m exhausted and that’s why I’m blogging about it already – I’d rather just sit here on the couch and blog while the girls play with all of Camryn’s new toys!
Lily slept the entire party, which was a blessing. She has been loving crawling around and playing with the balloons and sucking on the new toys though.
We’ve been trying to do a better job of planning some fun excursions for our Saturdays so we don’t just stay at home and get on one another’s nerves. So when we were offered the chance to go check out the grand opening of the Kohl’s Art Generation exhibit at the Milwaukee Art Museum (for free!), we jumped at the chance.
It’s a gorgeous museum with incredible architecture, and situated right on Lake Michigan. I can’t believe we hadn’t ever been there before!
Since it was the grand opening they had a few special things for the kids, like their own VIP passes and a scavenger hunt list.
We walked around a little at first and checked out some of the real art. Pretty cool stuff. My favorite was a chalkboard with some chalk scribbles on it. Avery thought she could have done a better job. :)
So there were three parts to the Kohls Art Generation. First we checked out the Studio, which is only open during certain times for projects (the rest of the rooms are open whenever the museum is). The girls had fun painting and also crafting some cool birds with feathers and such.
Lily and I hung out together while Merrick did most of the work with the girls.
Then we checked out the Gallery which was really interesting. They had all these Disney pictures and then they showed some of the behind the scenes – a picture of the real castle that inspired Cinderella’s, some stained glass that inspired parts of Beauty and the Beast, etc. Very cool.
In the Gallery they also had lots of projects you could do. Avery worked on a frame-by-frame movie drawing. And Merrick made a cool animation flip book. I helped Camryn draw various scenes from Finding Nemo. We spent over an hour in this room alone.
The last room was the Lab where the kids learned about different jobs people who work in a Museum do. They learned about Curators, Designers, Framers, etc. It was all hands on and interactive, very fun.
Anyways it was a great day. And the girls finished their scavenger hunts and got some prizes – pencil cases with pencils, notebooks, and sharpeners for each of them. We took our time and spent about 3 1/2 hours there. So glad we went – especially with these girls of mine that love, love, love to craft and color. It was perfect for them. I highly recommend checking it out!
