Blythe is 4 years old

I bet you're wondering why I didn't post yet about Blythe's real birthday (vs. her birthday party a couple weeks ago). Well, I was going to yesterday but we had a nice little ice storm that closed daycare early, so I had to wrap things up at work and go get the kiddos and Ethan absolutely will not let me on the computer when he's somewhere in the house with me. Fortunately, they were just on a delay this morning and not cancelled, so I can get some things done!

Anyway, Blythe is now 4 years old! I cannot really believe that 4 years has gone by so quickly. Gets me thinking that another quick 4 years from now, she'll be 8???? What???

We made her wait until after school and then after dinner before opening her presents (mostly because I didn't think our gift to her would get here until the 21st so I wanted her to have something to open on her actual birthday). However, our gift for her (a Leapster 2 and game) did get here on time...phew! So anyway, she got multiple phone calls from family wishing her a happy birthday and although she wasn't extremely talkative and in some cases not very nice, she at least did talk on the phone this year (as opposed to last year when she refused to talk to anyone who called).

Braden took her out to breakfast (to Carol Lee Donuts....mmmm) and I made cupcakes for her class at school, so really she did celebrate all day long.

Here is the birthday girl at 4 years old (officially):

And although at this age, they don't have a whole lot of milestones, I guess I should come up with a few things she is up to these days:

• She's currently in swimming lessons and might be able to do the "mini-barracudas" swim team this summer
• She starts back up with gymnastics next week, and although I highly doubt she'll ever make any sort of "gymnast", she has fun trying
• She also wants me to sign her up for dance class. I'll probably let her do this sometime after swim lessons are over.
• I'm trying to make her be more self-sufficient. Currently, we're working on brushing her teeth by herself (from putting the toothpaste on to washing up everything afterwards).
• Most of the time she's loving and nice, but she does have a certain mean streak going. I've noticed her kicking the dogs every now and then, and of course beating on her brother. She can also be a "mean girl" at school every now and then, though she doesn't have a problem making friends.
• She loves everything girly - playing dress up, playing with Barbies, and ponies, and her doll house, and beauty salon, etc. She'll play trucks with Ethan, but not for very long.
• She can write her own name and pretty much write most letters.
• She cannot read and I'm struggling with how to get her interested in trying to read. It's hard because she does like to use the computer and we have games to help with reading, but we can't do it if Ethan's around, which is pretty much all the time.
• I think she's about 40 or 41 inches tall and about 37 or 38 pounds.
• She really likes TV and movies a lot, and fortunately she goes to daycare so she doesn't have time to watch much.
• She still loves to sleep quite a bit. She'll usually sleep about 11 hours at night and she does seem to nap at least for a little while every day at day care. Most weekends she doesn't nap.

Anyway, that's probably good enough. Happy Birthday Blythe!

PS - today is also our dog Juni's birthday. She's 6 in people years (so 42 in dog years). We sang her Happy Birthday this morning, but no cake because Blythe said dogs don't like cake.