Matilda Turns Four!

It's hard to believe how much she's grown!  She's no longer my baby or my toddler; she's a big girl now!  She's imaginative and smart.  She's learning to draw recognizable pictures, she counts and picks out patterns.  Her vocabulary is amazing.  She's a little actress.  She loves to dance and sing.  She just tried swimming and loved it!  She's so tall!  She's a little mama to her baby sister and a best friend to Evelyn.  She can speak some words in French, Spanish and Chinese.  She will go to pre-school 4 days a week this fall.  She sings in the choir and loves Sunday school.  She makes up stories all day long and loves to be read to. She adores My Little Pony, Peppa Pig, and princesses.  Her current favorite movie is Madagascar, but she watches any new movie that she likes repeatedly--to the exclusion of all others--until she has it virtually memorized and, only then, will rotate other old favorites back into the mix.  She  is friendly and curious and loves her family and her routines.  She likes to cook and helps make scrambled eggs nearly every morning--she especially loves to make baked goods with Mommy.  She likes to run and dance and has become more brave.  She's potty trained.  She hates to brush her hair.  She loves to take a bath.  She still sleeps with a lovey and a pacifier.  She wears size 5 clothes and size 11 shoes.  Her favorite color is pink.  She says prayers before dinner and before bed.  She asks brilliant questions and makes up funny jokes.  She remembers everything.  She is a joy and I'm so lucky to be her mother.

To start her birthday off right, we put a bouquet of gerber daisies in her room before she woke up and dressed up her door with colored crepe streamers.  She LOVED the flowers and decorations.  It was her very first bouquet.  She toted them around for a while, touching and smelling them.  Then she threw them up in the air, expecting them to cascade down around her.  They were bound with a rubber band so they just landed with a thud on the floor and we put them in a vase on display.  We also decorated downstairs with balloons and streamers and decorated one of the "big chairs" as a birthday throne for her to sit in.

Grandma and Grandpa and Shanti and Laura and baby Ruth all came over for a lunch time birthday party.  Matilda was happy to have her guests and has indicated that she's starting to think about parties with friends her own age--maybe in a year or two!

She received so many generous gifts!  The Kirady's gave her barbie clothes and a My Little Pony with a train that she loves.  Aunt Natalie, Uncle Chase, and Boston sent her a My Little Pony with a little farm and she slept with it that night!  Grandma and Grandpa Gustafson brought her all sorts of wonderful presents--Prince Charming, a beautiful blue dress, a pretty night gown, a movie--all great!  Shanti and Laura brought her a polka-dot dress and brought cute clothes for Evelyn and Adelaide too so no one was left out.  My grandmother sent her a cute castle card in the mail and we got her two prince dolls and a bunch of ponies.  Evelyn was dying to unwrap something and Grandma had to keep hiding packages that Evelyn was starting to tear into and trying to distract her.  Matilda was absolutely delighted!

I'm really proud of how her cake turned out this year.  Twilight Sparkle is her favorite pony.  I tried a new decorating technique called a frozen buttercream transfer to decorate the cake and it turned out really well!  I will certainly do it again, but I'll be a little more aggressive with smoothing the frosting before freezing it next time, I had to do my best to iron out the squiggly fill lines with the tip of a knife after placing the transfer this time, but I still think it came out great--especially for a first try!
In addition to the FBT on top, I decorated with a rim of sparkly pink sugar crystals and a border of stars on top and around the base of the cake.  On the sides, I piped stars and placed a color coordinated nonpareil on the center of each star.  The inside was a vanilla cake dyed pink and purple to match Twilight Sparkle.  If you're interested, this is the image I was trying to recreate on top of the cake.

Matilda blew out all 4 candles on her own for the first time this year.  She wished to "go to the wild!"  Evelyn ate only frosting.  Adelaide loved her first tastes of cake and Matilda was delighted to have a little taste of cake and frosting and eat a little strawberry ice cream.  She requested Kraft macaroni and cheese for her birthday lunch so she had that with grapes and milk.  The grown ups had grilled fillet mignons that Ed butchered himself from a tenderloin primal.  We served thyme and garlic seasoned grilled sweet potato medallions and grilled onions on the side and had 2 bottles of red white and blue stripped Chandon "champagne" to toast our big girl turning FOUR!