our little girl is 4!!!

that's right. 4 years ago, mahala was born early on thanksgiving day! and she has grown up to be such a wonderful, talkative, creative, curious little girl. we peter-franks celebrated with some ice cream and some presents and she also got to stay up and watch part of charlie brown's thanksgiving. she was pretty wiped out by the end of the day adn we still have one more celebration to go after thanksgiving, with the franks.

this is love

you can see what a good sister mahala is 'most' of the time...tickling him, feeding him his greens, and sharing her drink (sort of)

sybille, morgan, noble and lola

here is our co-op at the park last week. this was the perfect see-saw for these 1 year olds (noble is the oldest of the clan, and sybille is the youngest by 4 months)

he cracks himself up

mahala's no slumber slumber party

the birthday girl, complete with whipped cream filled chocolate cupcakes and decked out in her new silky owl pajamas

















"movie" time with cocoa and popcorn...and lots of pillows and blankets even thought it was 75 degrees outside

















pillowcase decorating-the kids were amazingly into this activity-i never knew kids to have such long attention spans

















before the party, mahala labeled the goody bags with her excellent writing. so of course it is 2 weeks before her real birthday but this way we didn't miss anyone going out of town for the holidays. she had 10 friends over (schuyler and penelope from back in the days of co-op, leela and argil from preschool, and sofia, lucas, toby, eva, simon and emeline who are family friends) and even though there were so many kids and they all had way too much chocolate, there were no meltdowns! yea!

one more from halloween

just one more photo from our halloween experience. we went trick or treating with this crazy bunch of kids (this is at tomas and ceci's house). they all look so tired-and this was BEFORE trick or treating!

at grandma and papa's

i was craving sushi so i convinced mahala to 'help' me make some. she preferred eating it though!

much fun was had with grandma and papa. lots of ice cream, lots of playing-mahala said that she wants to spend every weekend there!