Mae's 4th Birthday

 

On Friday we got to celebrate at the park. Mae is so fortunate to have some very special friends that love her dearly. All these beautiful smiling children were adopted from China and all of them share a very special friendship.

 Saturday was Mae's birthday!! She woke up ecstatic... this is the first year she really truly understood and remembered from the year before.  For weeks we have counted down the days and it was finally here!! Mae is our little sunshine, she is always so full of joy and most of the time a little silliness too.  These pictures capture her beauty pretty well! She is looking a little more grown up to me  too!

 

We headed to IHOP for our traditional birthday breakfast.  Mae enjoyed chocolate pancakes and then we headed downtown to the Children's Museum. We actually took her here last year for her birthday too but it was such a good time we thought we would go back. This year she was a little older and got more into everything. It was SO MUCH FUN! I was bursting with pride as I watched her go from one activity to the next. She is incredible and all the time I can't believe she is ours!

 

This year we went for a no-fuss birthday... just simple fun with family. I didn't even make her cake, although I had intentions to.  We went to the store and she picked her sunshine cookie cake. How perfect for my little sunshine?! 

 

Mae got special gifts from very special people in her life. Whenever she opens gifts she wants to just play with the first one and forgets all about opening the others. I love this about her. So if you give this girl a tutu she will dance... I feel like this is the missing book in the "if you give a mouse a cookie" series.

Cody and I got her an ubooly. It's an interactive toy that encourages creative play. Ubooly is a stuffed doll that uses an app on the iPhone and interacts with children by asking them questions, playing imaginative games with them, tells jokes, and stories. I think it's one of the coolest little inventions for children. I'm telling you all about it so you can go check it out. (: www.ubooly.com

I can get pretty sappy pretty quickly when it comes to talking about my kids; we are blessed beyond measure. Our darling Mae is so uniquely beautiful and we celebrate her life every day. God gets all the glory for this one!! I can not help but praise him when I see how perfectly he placed this child into our family. She does not share our DNA and I do not get to think back to the day she was born. I don't even know what we were doing on that day, but I was created to be Mae's mom. She was 20 months old when we got her and there are some parts of her story that we may never know, but I hope that she will never doubt the hand of God in her life. She is so completely loved and so many people are a part of her story. I am beyond grateful to all those that have loved our girl, both near and far. There is no doubt that Mae has made an incredible mark on the lives of those that have cared for her. Mae is a very special girl and I am humbled to be her mother.