Happy Birthday, Ella Bella!!!

This Sunday our little sweetheart turned the BIG 6!!!! Needless to say that we started the celebration on Friday after school and partied the weekend away!! :) We did a lot of good stuff.

On Friday we went to Sea Life for another tour of the beautiful acquarium. If you have one close-by or ever happen to visit a place that does, it is so worth it! Or if you happen to be close-by Sea World, go for it! (we were going to go there this year but plans changed.) Anyway, it was a delight to watch all the beautiful sea creatures swim, crawl, or float. They even have a shark walk, an interactive rock pool, and awesome ocean themed background music.

We then grabbed some to-go from Hard Eight BBQ, our favorite barbeque place.

On Saturday morning we did the FAAN  (Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network) Walk which is a great fund raiser event to support food allergies awareness and research. I can't tell you how nice it felt to be around folks like us who struggle with food allergies day in and day out. It was comforting and reassuring. I felt a spirit of hope in the air, a hope for so much needed research breakthroughs in this field. And I know that everyone present there felt the same. It is just something so special and unifying about being part of a cause and food allergies is OUR CAUSE. And when I told Ella that in a couple of weeks we have an appointment with a doctor that is using a different approach to try to desensitize the body of allergens, her face literally lit up. Great hopes and prayers going up for her and all those like her.

The walk was in a wonderful neighborhood equipped with a pretty cool park which of course was the number one attraction for all the kids after the walk!



After the walk, we came home, grabbed some lunch, and headed out again to Ray Roberts Lake, a beautiful state park about an hour away built around a very large lake. We had a great time there, trying our hand at fishing and just hanging out together.



"Fishie, fishie, fishie!!"

And a little photoshoot...:

And finally, the actual birthday on Sunday!! Sweetie pie dressed-up in her princess dress (which is a party dress she managed to get sweet Maitreyee, her dearest cousin, to give to her!) and waited for the surprise birthday gift:

And no birthday is complete without CAKE (we made marble cake and Ella decorated it with very little help):

It was definitely a weekend and day to remember!!!

First week report

The first week of school was crazy but somehow we managed to survive it! Getting up at 6:15 in the morning was the hardest part, followed by all the little tasks that had to be done by 7:25 when we had to leave for school. Heating-up the thermos and  heating up the food to go into the thermos were two of those.

I guess being a mother of a child with food allergies has made me into a bit of crazy person! Or maybe my own craze for eating healthy and balanced, or I don't know what I else has contributed... But ever since Ella was old enough to start solids, I ALWAYS made sure that her meals included one or two veggies, protein, grains, and a piece of fruit. And this awareness and desire to feed her the best that I could have increased when she turned nine months old and tested positive for dairy, milk, peanut and treenut allergies. Food allergies add a lot of stress to life. Really the stress comes in when you know your child does not really have any options (like choosing one of the lunch caffeteria menu items) but most importantly, when you realize they may not be safe at school. That's been my biggest stress, my biggest crazy-thing-to-worry-about on this first week of school.  My sweetheart made it easy on me though by constantly telling me that she would never eat or share food with/from anyone because she doesn't want to have a reaction or use the safety thing (that is the Epi-pen), how she calls it. [She is so aware and careful that sometimes I feel I can see through her little body, the mature and adult spirit she brings from heaven.] The school teacher, nurse, and all the staff have been really wonderful about this so far.

I think I even figured out how much she will eat in the 15-30 mins lunch break they get at 10:30 am!!!! Yes, that's when the have lunch.  On the first few days she would bring back almost all the food untouched saying she didnt' have enough time to eat. Poor thing, lots of changes thrown at her and at all children of her age starting school.

So we survived first week, yeay!!

Sweetie pie with her 3-D peacock. (She worked so hard to carefully color all the tail feathers and then put it together with daddy's help.)

Sweetie pie in a swim make-up class. Two or three levels up. She did a good job though trying to keep pace with the seven and eight year olds in the class. (I threw in a couple of other by-the-pool pictures as that's Ella's and my favorite past time when we can fit it in.)

And while I'm at it, I think a quick update on our backyard project is in order!

Can't wait for it all to be finished! It will be really pretty.