She's a Party Girl

Our baby girl turned 7 yesterday. Time really does fly! It seems like it was not so long ago that our son was an only child and our daughter was still an unrealized dream. This weekend we were all operating in the mode of "all Jessica all of the time" since she was able to have two parties this weekend! On Saturday, her actual birthday, we celebrated at home with family. My husband made a great pan of lasagna and we enjoyed a family dinner in the company of Jessie's Grandparents, Aunt, Uncle and cousins.
Today we hosted a party at the local roller skating rink. Jessica has some really nice friends from the neighborhood and from school. She knows some of the girls from her soccer team and some from her Brownie troop. Others she went to kindergarten with last year and a few are new friends from her 1st grade class this year. It was an enjoyable afternoon of good clean fun topped off by her favorite vanilla Costco cake. Here's a shot of Jess enjoying her special day:

Best Friends: New and Old

My best friend, my husband, has recently become a little jealous about the time I spend with my laptop. Part of that time has been spent on "work" as an Etsy seller, but a lot more of that time was spent trying to deal with a slow outdated computer and troubleshoot problems related to having an almost overloaded hard drive. So for Christmas he got me a new laptop! Isn't it lovely? It came with a printer too, I haven't hooked it up yet. Click the image to meet my new best friend:It has a lot more memory and is faster than my old one. It runs with Windows Vista which I haven't used yet so I'm slowly figuring out the differences between Vista and XP. This laptop has a lot of features I've never had, like a built in web cam, so I'll be spending some time in the near future learning how to use them!
Now the kids are fighting over who will claim the old laptop; little do they know that neither of them will have it for their own. We think the family computer should be out in the open where the sites they visit can be easily monitored. Luckily they are too young for now to be on MySpace or on chat sites. The worst they've seen so far has been YouTube which can show you things you don't expect even when doing an innocent search. Our oldest (10) uses it occasionally for homework, either for research or word processing. Our youngest (nearly 7) likes Webkinz and a few PC games she has on disk. I dread the day that we have to worry about them connecting to the sinister outside world! I wish they could remain innocent just a little bit longer. But then again, our oldest starts middle school next year so he'll get more of a real world experience soon enough. In our part of the county, the middle and high schoolers share the buses, so he'll be a 6th grader riding with kids through 12th grade. I'm hoping they are allowed to bring iPods on the bus so he can listen to music instead of listening to the older kids' chatter! Any advice?

I just got home from cookie exchange party #1 of 2. The next one is Saturday morning, here in my neighborhood. Tonight I brought home a collection of yummy treats plus I enjoyed chatting with old friends as well as new ones. THANKS to Kristin for hosting this fun event!

In other news, I received my new ring from Firefall Studios today. They re-sized it for me and it fits perfectly! This is the ring I wrote about wanting back in October and now thanks to my parents for funding most of it as this year's gift; it now belongs to me. It has the birthstones of our two children which happen to look great together. Here's a photo in case you didn't memorize the image when I posted months ago...
The other neat thing about the stones in this ring is that there is one peridot, the birthstone of our 1st child and there are 2 amethysts~ the birthstone of our 2nd child. Get it?