A Whole Hand Old

I cannot believe Rowen turned FIVE years old last week...a whole hand old, just crazy!  Now that she's older, its fun to interview her each year on her birthday. Check it out...

How old are you:  Five 

What grade are you in: Kindergarten (hands go in the air)!

Favorite Color:  Purple & Pink

What is your favorite animal: dog

What is your favorite Book: Amelia Badelia 

Favorite TV show: Team Umizoomi

Favorite movie: Moana (shocker)

Where do you want to go on vacation: to see the beach

What is your favorite drink: water

What is your favorite breakfast food: French Toast Sticks or egg sandwich or pancakes

What is your favorite food:  Ham and Cheese sandwich

Where is your favorite place to go: The Buffalo Restaurant (aka Buffalo Wild Wings)

Favorite snack: Fruit snacks

Favorite outfit: dress or Moana shirt

What do you like to take to bed with you at night: Froggy

What's your favorite game: Moana necklace game

Favorite toy:  ipad (mom cringes)

Who is your best friend: Aubrey

What is your favorite thing to do inside: watch tv and play with my brother

Favorite thing to do outside: wiggle car or swim or play with corbin and carver, lol

Favorite holiday: Christmas

What do you want to be when you grow up: Singer

We celebrated her actual birthday (Thursday) at home with gifts and donuts.  Then, spent all day Sunday afternoon with her friends at an adorable art studio in Grimes for a painting party, and ended the day celebrating with family at our house!

Rowen definitely has some big changes coming her way in a few weeks when kindergarten starts, but I know she's gonna do wonderful!  Happy Birthday, baby girl, we love you!

Rowen Preschool Update

For the past two months, Rowen has been in three year old preschool and is loving it!  We had her first conference a week or so ago and had a great report!  The teacher referred to her as a “breath of fresh air”...so sweet! 

At the conference, we were showed a summary of how she’s progressing and were very pleased with what we saw!  She knows most of her letters and numbers, and has really started writing her name legibly so that we can read it! 

Rowen is lucky in that she has two of her good friends in class with her, but is also making new friends, too, which is what we wanted for her this year! 

Her teacher is beyond wonderful and Rowen loves her.  She talks about Mrs. Megan all the time and even wants to pretend to be her when we play school at home - so cute!

I totally did the ever so popular "first day of school" picture with her {link for the sign I used} and even filled out a cute little survey I found online {here}, too!  I plan to print both and put them in her keepsake box so she has them to look back on in the future!  

Rowen's Big Girl Room

I've been promising this particular post for a long time and I've had people asking when I am going to post it, so finally I'm getting around to doing it!  Warning though, my phone is a big piece of crap and the pictures don't do it justice.  The colors stand out so much better than you see here!

About nine months ago we moved Rowen into a big girl bed.  Rowen absolutely LOVES her bed and her room, and will proudly show it off to anyone that comes over!  It's actually one of my favorite rooms in our house so I gladly help show it off right along side her! :)

Bed:  Her bed is obviously the focal point of the room.  I am obsessed with the color white, so I decided to be daring and do it all white, to my surprise it's stayed very clean!

I LOVE the bedding and the headboard.  Together they scream "girly-girl", which is exactly Rowen's personality.  She calls it her "princess bed"!

Lighting: Above her bed is this light.  Its made of paper, which I love and adds just the right amount of "pizzaz" to her room!

Her window also adds a lot of natural light as you can tell!

The walls:  Three out of four of the walls are a very pale blue color.  The fourth wall (the accent wall) is pink and white stripes!  The accent wall is by far my FAVORITE thing in her room.  Ryan spent six hours slaving over these stripes.  He did an amazing job, but he swears he will never do it again. We'll see about that... :)  I was nervous about how everything would look, but when it was all said and done I was thrilled with how each color compliments the others so well!

Furniture:  We decided to keep her furniture to a minimum since the bed takes up a majority of the space in her room.  The dresser we bought is amazing.  It's huge inside so it should last her a long time!  I still have plans to change out the knobs, but I have yet to find exactly what I want.

Decor:  The decor in her room is a bit hodge podgy, but it works!  I kept quite a few items from her nursery and incorporated them.

We also kept her book shelves, which were a gift from her uncle, her growth chart and matching hair bow organizer.

I struggled with decor on the walls for quite awhile, until one day, a friend of mine offered me a few prints from her old Katie Daisy calendar. I immediately snatched them up and framed them!  Talk about easy and inexpensive!  They work perfectly!

For the accent wall I hit up Hobby Lobby and found a couple of pieces of framed art, a banner, and a cardboard letter "R", which I painted.  I love how well it all stands out against the pink and white stripes!  

Rowen's reaction to her room the first time she saw it?  "Oooooh, it's so beautiful, just like a princess"  <---- that's my girl!  ;)

Room Details: 

Bedding/Light Fixture/Blue Paint/Pink Paint/Growth Chart/Hair bow Organizer/Dresser/Headboard

Shared with:

Thrifty Decor Chick

Rowen Turns 3!

I promised last week that I’d have a re-cap of Rowen’s birthday on the blog, but that didn’t happen, sorry.  Finally getting around to it now though! 

Last year, we did one party with both family and a few friends, but this year we split it up and did two...a “friend party” and a “family party”, I’ll start with the “friend party”…

Guests: Over the past year we’ve gotten to know a few of our neighbors really well - so well in fact, that the kids request to play with each other all the time!  So we thought what the heck, invite 15 kids and their parents and see what happens!  We busted out the inflatable pools, sprinkler, slip ‘n slide and water tables and had ourselves a big ol' backyard bash!  Thank goodness for the water because it was HOT, but the kids loved it!

Theme: Naturally, the theme of the party was "princesses".  Specifically, Ariel and Sofia, which are Rowen’s two most favorite princesses!  I even decided to dress the part.  When I walked downstairs that morning wearing THIS, Rowen’s jaw just about hit the floor.  “Mom, Ariel is on your shirt, Ariel is on your shirt!”, she yelled.  Totally worth it!

(for those of you asking, I found the tank here, and for the record, no I was NOT wearing the matching undies, ha!)

Confession: I took a bunch of décor pictures, but then accidentally deleted them when I was going through my iPhone later that night (whoops).  

Food: I don’t know about you, but every year around mid-July, Ryan and I get really barbecue-d out.  Not sure why, but for some reason we get to a point where a grilled hamburger or hot dog no longer sounds appetizing.  So instead of grilling, we decided to do walking tacos!  Talk about an easy, fairly inexpensive meal idea --- they were a hit as was the rest of the party!  A big thanks to all of our friends for celebrating with us!

**

The next morning we woke up early and headed to Panora where we met up with family.  We decided to do this party out at the lake to give everyone on my side of the family a day of boating and tubing!  There was no real theme, just a few balloons and some festive tableware, our view of the lake itself was decoration enough! 

We ate sandwiches and cake, boated, tubed, and opened gifts! It was relaxing and fun, a big thanks to my in-laws for hosting! 

The rest of the weekend was spent playing with all the new toys Rowen received (pretty sure we now own every single Ariel and Sofia toy known to man).  

Monday was Rowen's actual birthday!  It was rainy so we decided to travel north to Ames to check out the library (locals:  this place is awesome for kids) and have lunch at one of our favorite restaurants, Hickory Park, where she got a free ice cream and a birthday song!  

What a fun-filled, party hardy weekend it was!