Emma is Eight

Despite my best efforts she just continues to grow. There are not enough positive adjectives in the entire English language (or Spanish or French or even Italian) to describe our Emma. She is amazing. She is kind, smart, clever, funny, beautiful, compassionate, determined, talented, creative, selfless, earnest, capable, strong and self-motivated to do what is good. She turned eight years old one week ago, on the 10th. She'll be baptised this Saturday.

Last Saturday was her birthday party. She chose "baking" as her theme this year. So seven little friends came over and we made cookie-cutter sugar cookies all together. I was a little bit (pleasantly) surprised at how engaged the girls all remained through adding the ingredients and the first couple of batches of cutting out shapes. After that, most of the party people began breaking off to go play elsewhere, but a few diehards stayed with me rerolling the trimmings till the very end. All in all a very successful fun little girl party. I made the party-favor aprons out of a tablecloth from Target. That was a fun (but time-consuming) endeavor. Check out Dani's look (front row, 2nd from left)...I'm sure she was smiling normally when I said, "three". But those Fake Cruzes have a history of making weird faces at the last minute.