Happy 5th Birthday, Lauren!!

Lauren turned 5 on February 12th, and we had planned to have a big party with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.  But...Mother Nature had a different plan! Because we had just received another 17 or so inches of snow, we had a small party with the 6 of us on her actual birthday. We had her bigger family party the next week. Here are a few shots of her special day:

She chose to eat dinner at Hunan, a local Chinese restaurant.

A pretty girl with her handsome daddy.

Lauren wanted a "cookie cake" on her birthday; she had a Tinkerbell cake at her family party the following week.

This birthday was all about Tinkerbell!!

Best Friends

Preston LOVES to take off his clothes.  This is typically how I find him before I go to bed at night!

Mommy's little "helpers"...

All snuggled up!

"Let me give you a great big hug!!"

I just had to post a few more pictures of Preston and Parker.  They make us smile every day!  :)

The Great Blizzard of 2011

Lauren had fun on the snow Daddy shoveled from the driveway.

This was our back patio; the snow was as deep as the cushion on our chairs and drifted up to the grill.

The girls playing!

Katie lost her snow boot in a huge drift; she tried to step out of it and her foot came out of her boot!  "Handy Daddy," as Lauren likes to call him, came to the rescue and poked around in the snow until he found it!

A blizzard in Oklahoma--definitely one for the record books!!

The boys played in the snow for a little while...and then they decided that was enough!!

Well, now that we are safely into April, I thought I would post some pictures of the blizzard that we had on February 1st.  Wow...what a couple of weeks we had during the first half of February!!  Record snowfall (15 inches when the blizzard hit, then another 17 inches or so the next week), record cold temperatures (-27 degrees in Bartlesville), and school was cancelled for 7 days (they had already missed two days for snow/ice previously).  I must say that, although the snow made getting around town a real hassle for quite a while, it was beautiful and the kids had a lot of fun playing in it!