May 6th, 2012

I didn’t do a This Week’s Happenings last week because our week was filled mainly with Mikayla’s birthday activities which I posted about here and here.  This week has proven to be very busy with out of country visitors and birthday party preparations.  We also spent a lot of time playing with birthday gifts she had already received.

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She got into the stamp pad without us looking!  See that big thing of stickers there…it is already halfway gone!

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Playing her version of Candy Land – the gingerbread men characters visit the different "candy stores" and eat all the candy!

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This was a craft sent from her aunts and uncles and cousins.  She has named it Aunt Christa and plays with it like it is a doll.

On Monday evening two people from Switzerland arrived to visit Cabrini for a couple of days.  We hosted them, along with several other staff members for dinner on Monday night and breakfast on Tuesday morning.  For dinner we had lasagna, spaghetti, salad, homemade bread and a Snickerdoodle cake for dessert.  After spending the majority of the day prepping for dinner I was exhausted after our guests left.  Then we got up the next day and made a fabulous breakfast of fresh squeezed OJ, eggs, bacon (both grilled and fried), fried potatoes and more fresh bread!  It was delicious but we were so full we couldn’t find it in ourselves to eat much for lunch or dinner!  The best part about our guests (at least for Mikayla the best part) was that the girl’s name was Michaela!  She thought it was really silly to say her name for someone else!

We have converted Joe to being a Settlers of Catan player, so we had a fun evening of Settlers after Mikayla went to bed on Friday.  I won of course, which made the evening even more enjoyable!

We have officially entered "winter" here, but it didn’t feel much like it!  It warmed back up again this week after a quick cold spell last week so we spent some time in Mikayla’s swimming pool playing.  We played with both princess dolls and her tea set.  And she spent a lot of time riding her rocking horse swing, despite the heat.  She also spent some time playing in the mango tree with her Super Mikayla cape (thanks Cat, Dave and Molly) trying to save Flounder who was supposedly at the top of the tree!  Her imagination never ceases to amaze me.

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Where is Flounder, Super Mikayla?

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Tea party in the swimming pool…doesn’t get much better than this!

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At night when it cools off some Mikayla enjoys sitting and staring at stuff on her rocking horse swing.  I think it is really precious.

On Saturday we had Mikayla’s Mickey themed birthday party, more on that later.

But most exciting news of the week is that we bought plane tickets to head back to the US for a visit from August 19-September 24.  Plans while we are there are still up in the air and Ben will be working for most of that, but we were excited to get the tickets out of the way!   We will keep you posted of details as the time gets closer (and we have them of course)!

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