Two Wonderful Years

I'm sure I will never cease to be amazed at how fast my kids grow up. I'm amazed that my children celebrated their second birthday today. The last 24 months have flown by so quickly. There have been times that have been incredibly hard, but our days are generally filled with so much fun and laughter. I was thinking today about our journey to parenthood and how slowly the 21 months of trying to conceive went. My life is so different now than it was then and I can't think of one thing that is worse. I love my little family. I was laying the girls into bed tonight and didn't want to put them down. They were more than ready to sleep. To them, this was just another day, even though it was filled with friends, family, cake, singing and presents. They are old enough to tell people how old they are, but don't understand the significance of today's party. To us, as their parents, today marks the 2nd anniversary of the best thing that ever happened to us.

We started our day by taking the kids to Toys R Us to buy strollers for their babies. They knew we were going to buy something, but they didn't know what. Cork and I planned on getting them strollers and wrapping them like the rest of their presents, but a couple weeks ago I mentioned that I thought we should let them buy the strollers. They are very excited about buying things right now and were so cute at the store. Eiley was in the cart that I was pushing and spotted the strollers even before I could point them out. She started yelling "buy that" and pointing to the stroller. Cork pulled his cart up next to mine and Arya quickly chimed in. We took the kids out and let them pick their colors. Of course Eiley picked a pink stroller and Arya picked a blue one. We bought the strollers and set them up in the parking lot. Both girls were so excited about pushing the strollers around. Once home, the strollers kept them busy while we got ready for their party.

We celebrated their birthday with a cookout with friends and family. The girls got to eat their favorite food, hot dogs. When we took the kids to the state fair recently, both became obsessed with cows. At my baby shower, one of my friends gave me a CD with kid songs based on a line of kid books. The songs are entertaining and not too bad to listen to as an adult. The kids love the CD all of the sudden and beg for the cow song every time we're in the car. They can listen to that song over and over and over and...you get the picture. Anyway, I was going to make monkey cakes for them until they started this cow obsession. I took pictures of the cakes before setting them in front of the kids. We ended up taking more pics of the kids in front of the cakes and I had to remind them over and over not to touch the cakes. The poor girls were tortured with the cakes sitting right there and not be able to touch them. Arya kept getting as close as possible without actually touching it.

After cake we moved onto presents. Both girls were excited about opening their gifts and needed very little help. A couple gifts were wrapped with more tape than they could handle, but they managed to get almost everything open themselves. They are now the happy owners of lots and lots of baby stuff along with a couple Bitty Babies. Arya and Eiley love babies all of the sudden and their birthday couldn't have been better timing to load up on their new favorite toys. They are going to have so much fun over the next few months playing with all of their new toys.

We are so blessed to have these amazing children in our lives and to be able to share their birthday with so many lovely friends and family members. Before the party started, Cork brought their new Cozy Coupe car up from the basement. Both kids noticed the big package right away and Cork made some comment about it being the Elephant in the room. Both kids thought that we'd wrapped up an elephant for them and kept talking about the elephant and touching it.