Annmare's 3rd Birthday Weekend

We celebrated Annmarie's 3rd birthday all weekend.

Here's what we did.

Annmarie woke up to this new play kitchen...
And our family birthday banner that goes up for everyone's birthday.
But back to the kitchen for a bit - the thing had about 10,000 pieces. Yes, I'm exaggerating, but not by much. Look for yourself.
That's love. It's ok though, the 4 1/2 hours that it took us to put together was totally worth it, AM loves it.

AM asked have her toenails painted a couple of weeks ago and I told her I would do it for her birthday.
She insisted on blue and picked out the color a couple of days before.We then went out to breakfast.

Here she is just wondering why her babyccino is taking so long.
There they are.
We had a nice breakfast and AM discovered that you could hear the ocean in a seashell. She thought that was pretty cool
We then got ready to go to the beach.
We went down to the sea pool. The pool was a bit chilly, so we didn't do much swimming, but Annmarie got to quickly show Dad how she swims. We then played at the beach.
We walked home and AM took a good nap and I tried making her a 'big' cake.
Total Mom/Cake fail. The cake came out too dense and not meant for stacking. I think the recipe I used was more for a sheet cake. I also blame our oven, it doesn't bake very evenly.

Anyway, I just used one of the round cakes and Annmarie still loved it and said - Wow, that's a big cake. We had tacos (AM's favorite) for dinner and opened the coveted can of black beans.

She was very excited for her candles this year and for us to sing happy birthday and eagerly wanted to blow out the candles herself - unlike last year.
And really, how did she get so big.
Three. Wow.
On Sunday, we went back to the beach. This time we went over to the peninsula side where the water is a bit warmer and calmer and there is a lot of shade. Great for kids and families.
Annmarie got to show off her swimming skills and didn't want to leave.
We had saved a couple more presents for her to open.
It was a great weekend, one completely devoted to Annmarie. We tried to make it special for her and include all her favorite things. It would have been nice to have a party for her this year, given we didn't have one last year and I think she would have been really into it, but she really seemed happy with everything. She pretty much got undivided attention from her two biggest fans all weekend.

We love you to pieces, Annmarie.

Happy Birthday!