My baby is 4 (Hurray!)

There's nothing like a birthday to really highlight the fact that I no longer care about taking pictures.  Maybe tomorrow, I'll try to take a picture of Elise, where she's actually, you know, looking at the camera and trying to smile or something.  Just to document that she's four now.  I only snapped a couple of pictures at Elise's party this morning.  I wish I had taken a couple of pictures while they were "flower arranging", but I missed that entirely.  So at this little party, the girls colored princess pictures while we were waiting for everyone to arrive.  After that, we played a little game where they each picked a flower out of a vase I had prepared.  Then they had to go into the living room to search for the identical flower.
Next, each girl picked a vase (some that I already had, and some that I thrifted), and added rocks or beans.  Then they got to pick which flowers to put in their vase. 
After that, we did some silly dances, like the Rock and Roll Freeze Dance, and Ring around the Rosies, and stuff to get out the wiggles.  Then they made necklaces.  Then we did the cake thing and finally opened presents.  Elise had a great time, and I hope the other girls did too.

This is one of the little tables before the girls arrived.  We had a lot of random stuff at this party, like the silly swans, which were filled with gummy bears and mini m&m's.

Most of the little flower arrangements, waiting to be taken home.  I had quite the assortment of blossoms to choose from.  I got them at Walmart the day after Memorial Day for dirt cheap.

Making necklaces.

Blowing out candles.

Top view of cake.  A word about the cake:  I really wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.  Being the smart observant mother that I am, I also knew that Elise wanted a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.  However, it can be difficult to make chocolate frosting look, well, attractive to a 4 year old.  So after much searching of the internet wasting much time, the solution we came up with was to frost the cake chocolate, and then pile frosting roses on top.  It was fun.  My mom helped me learn to do the roses, as it's sort of new territory for me.  I hate fondant, so these are just made of regular old frosting, and you pipe them instead of forming them like play dough (which I assume is how it is done with fondant).  Anyway, turned out to be a pretty fun cake to make, and it looked girly and fabulous, and had a lot of frosting for those frosting lovers out there.  Best of all, it was underneath all it's frill, really just a chocolate cake with chocolate frosting.  Elise wanted it heart shaped, and luckily my mom had heart shaped layer pans, so it worked out just fine.

And that concludes our birthday trimester.  Can I call it that?  My birthday is in March, Aaron in April, Frank in May, and Elise in June.  All lined up in a row.  Can it be a birthday trimester?  Maybe trimester is the wrong word?  What would be the right word for a chunk of months representing a third of a year?