Sweet Sixteen

We celebrated my oldest daughters birthday today. A little early but she wanted to have a small party (which we haven't done in a number of years.) Her actually birthday is the 28th. We decided on trying to do an English Garden theme. She did a few games with either words from birthday, party, or words related to England. She also did another game with British literature where she read a quote from a book and her guests needed to guess the book and the author. After that they played a simple version of pictionary just for fun.

Her sister Natania and I decorated the basement in as many floral type things as we had. I bought some fabric, tulle, artificial flowers, and xmas lights. Thankfully those were at the stores very early this year. I did not want to hunt for those among our Christmas decorations - we have many, many boxes. Here are some of the photos:









I had her cake made at Sam's club and it was really good and a good price for the size that it was. A couple of the girls last minute couldn't make it which was too bad. I certainly couldn't have made this:






We also had a small section of a table with a few different types of candies - some hershey kisses, skittles, sweet tarts, dinner mints and life savers laid out in a variety of floral dishware. This was to be the "Sweet" in sweet sixteen. The girls had small purple bags to fill with some candy to take home.







A tribute to a sister. . . Arianna came up with this last minute and asked one of their mutual friends to help her with it.



She tried to put this to a rap kind of beat but here are the words:

S-i-x-t double E - N
thas right
she'z my best friend
smilez
cuz Gabrielle b the 1 who putz the smile on me
Mz. G-A-B-R to the I-E-L-L-E
We rappin' to say Happy B-day

365 day Project - 31

Whooo, whooo Gabrielle got her braces off today. The two years went by fast. She now needs a retainer on top and bottom. Then she will be slowly weened off the retainers but the process takes about two years.



Don't her teeth look great! All to the tune of roughly $5,000 dollars - it might as well be the million dollar smile slogan since that amount is just as hard to come by. Thankfully we had the insurance and the budget to get it started. Now to move on to the other kids. Arianna is scheduled for sometime in March to get them started anyway. And we might have to bump Annaliese up because she could need her top jaw stretched. Sounds painful, doesn't it. But apparently it is better to do it before the end of puberty because the bones in your skull start to fuse then.

Dieting Days

My oldest daughter and I set out together to try to do the Weight Watchers program at home without attending meetings. Too expensive right now. For our first week it went really well. I lost 3 lbs and Gabrielle lost 2 lbs. We are doing pretty well on week 2 also which just started today. We are using the old "tool" books - the points finder sliding thing and points booster sliding thing. I really don't want to buy one of those new calculators but I will if we have to. My sliding booklets are wearing thin in spots. We even cheated a little but still lost pounds. I think one of the big secrets to successful weight loss it to write it all down. I read on another blog the phrase "you bite it you write it" which is so true. We are heading out to Fort Wayne, Indiana for a week (we leave Sunday) and we will bring our points finder with us. Then when we come back we will work on implementing an exercise and toning segment of our dieting journey.

I'm really proud of my daughter for taking the initiative. I had talked with her about it last year and she was definitely not interested but because she is short like me it shows up faster. She actually is shorter than me and may not even reach my height of 4'10" so it is good for her to work at this while she is young. That way she will have better over all health in the long run.