A Whole Hand

How is it possible that our baby girl turns 5 today- or as Eden says it "A whole hand." I spent some time recently looking through a thousand or so photos of her growing up and it makes me want to cry! How is it that I had forgotten so many of these moments in her life? So today she is five. She is very excited about this. She loves to talk in bed with us at night about "growing up." She's very excited about losing teeth (it's a long way off but she loves talking about what it will be like when it happens), and starting kindergarten in the fall. Eden is our silly girl. She loves being silly, making funny noises, blowing bubbles in her drink, and...recently...potty talk of course. She would rather play in her fantasy worlds with her little princesses, fairies and evil witches than anything else. She loves hearing stories- especially if they are scary and they must always have an evildoer. She loves to run and FAST! She's really very good at it- I can never catch her. She loves talking about the fastest animals in the world and always smiles big when we tell her that she is the fastest. I love to see her face light up when she feels confident in herself and her abilities. She is learning to read and hates almost every minute of it. But when she gets through a book with me she is so proud of herself and tells everyone that she can read now. She's very friendly and is never afraid to make new friends (even ones that don't speak English). AND she loves loves loves her little brother Foxy. He is her closest friend. They play and have fun together, and they get into mischief together. When Fox brought out the present he hid for her, Eden said, "Oh! Thank you Fox! When I get older I'm going to marry you." and Fox said "Awwww." I think that's probably the best compliment a 5 year old can offer her brother, don't you?

We decided to celebrate with Grandma and Grandpa Burton on Saturday before they left. We made the cake Friday night. After attempting a homemade cake and icing for Fox's b-day (cake was good, icing had the texture of toothpaste) we asked Grandma to bring a box cake and tub of icing from the states. It was sooo much easier. I let the kids lick the bowl and after a matter of seconds they looked like this. After the bowl was empty we carried them off to the tub where Fox said in a most serious tone to Eden, "I want to lick your face."

I thought we would kick off her bday with her favorite breakfast- cereal. This girl LOVES cereal. Since she loves eating it so much for breakfast, I have to make sure that what she eats is healthy. In DC it's Kashi, but here the selection is a little different. So, she's been eating a lot of cornflakes- which she loves. I got a cereal sampler of 8 different sugar cereals and set them out with some flowers with a little fairy queen she wanted tucked in the leaves. Gandpa made the balloon crown. She was so excited when she woke up and saw "her table." She immeadiately went into Grandma's room and had her come down and see. Eden said, "Look at all this sugar cereal. My mom never lets me have sugar cereal. She says it's not healty for my body. I know she just wants me to be healthy, but this is...this is...this is RIDICULOUS!" Ridiculous is one of Eden's favorite words. She consumed 4 of those boxes in record time. She was one happy girl.
Eden decided that she wanted to spend her bday at the zoo. We LOVE the zoo and neither Andrew, nor his parents, had been yet so this was a great opportunity to go. Wouldn't ya know it would be our first schorching hot day in Vienna? Still, we all had a wonderful time.


We headed back early to make sure Eden would have plenty of time to open presents and play with her new toys. I just have to post every one of these pictures so you can see her expressions. The whole time it was "Awww." and "Cute!." She was so adorable and genuinely excited and grateful for her gifts. At the end of the day I was asking her what her favorite gift was. She said it was the Stoick figurine from the "How to Train Your Dragon" movie- the gift that Fox got her. I said I bet she really liked her castle from Grandma Pam and Papa David or the "breakable things" from Grandma and Grandpa Burton. She looked at me and said. "Shhh! Honey, I don't want to hurt Fox's feelings." So, everytime I ask her what her favorite gift was she always looks for Fox and says proudly that it was Stoick.


And finally, the cake! Eden loves the How to Train Your Dragon movie. She loves the characters and the stories so this year she wanted a how to train your dragon bday party. Well, we're going to do the party with her friends in DC when we get back, but we still wanted to make the cake special for her celebration here. Grandma was the mastermind behind the waves. We don't have any pics of her blowing out her candles b/c as soon as she saw the cake she blew them out and grabbed the toys off the top. She was super excited to say the least.

That's our girl! Today is her "official" bday. We're having a great, low-key day. We took tons of pics when Grandma and Grandpa were here so as soon as we can sift through the best of 500 or so, we'll post them.