The children have gone cannibalistic

My mother blames it on the spring. The children are acting crazy, refusing to go to bed, running around the house, jumping on each other and me, shrieking and making all sorts of odd noises. This trend has been escalating over the past two weeks, with what I hope was a climax yesterday. Recently, Rebekah was bitten by another child during a playdate. This week she was playing with Annabelle and decided to bite her clothes like a puppy. She accidentally bit Annabelle. We dealt with that and hopefully convinced her not to try it again. The next day Annabelle was bitten TWICE by a child at daycare. It seems that this classmate was determined to get Annabelle, so the teachers had to keep them separated all day. After being used as a chew toy, I suppose Annabelle was pretty annoyed, so last night she bit me on the shoulder. What is wrong with these children???!!! I've never encountered this problem. I just hope it's over.

learning to write

I almost forgot to tell you that two weeks ago Rebekah wrote her name. She is terribly proud and has been practicing it faithfully ever since.

The Enchanted Forest

We have been taking family walks in the evening this week--a habit that I hope we can continue--and a couple of days ago we discovered a sign with the words "Rosewood Nature Trail."
We were suspicious of the title because we live in a residential area and the trail appeared to lead into someone's backyard. We headed down the trail and found ourselves on a bumpy but scenic woodsy path that in some places made us forget the there were, in fact, people's backyards about two feet to our right. Rebekah immediately named it the Enchanted Forest and began telling us stories of all the enchanted snakes and frogs that live there. In one spot we saw a rose bush, and I asked Rebekah what she thought might happen if we picked an enchanted rose. She answered confidently that the police would come and arrest us. We came out of the enchanted woods and found that we had traveled almost a full circle, ending up on an apparently new sidewalk, still surrounded by loose dirt that had been used to level it. "Look!" exclaimed Rebekah, "Enchanted dirt!"

Happy Birthday Annabelle!

Today Annabelle is officially one year old!

Annabelle's birthday party

Annabelle's birthday party Saturday was great! We had planned a garden party, but the yard was too wet, so it was more of a garden-themed party. It was a real baby party--seven of the twelve children were under two years old. I made French vanilla cupcakes with lemon-cream cheese filling and buttercream icing. For the flowers I used pre-colored fondant and flower-shaped cutters. For the butterflies, I piped melted chocolate onto wax paper in the shapes of wings and bodies and filled them in with yellow candy:



Annabelle, of course, had her own little cake to smash up herself:



The favorite snacks of the party were chocolate-covered pretzel sticks molded into the shape of daisies:



The creation I was most proud of was my fruit flower basket:



The kids planted marigolds in flower pots to take home. Here are Lily and James posing with their flowers and Annabelle trying to put her flower back on its stem ofter she pulled it off (she later tried to eat it):




In all, it was great fun, and Annabelle was a happy (almost) one-year-old.