zion's 3rd birthday party

We celebrated Zion's 3rd birthday on Saturday July 6th.  His real birthday was on the 9th, but we had his party a couple days early.  Of course he had a Cars themed birthday party.  Again.  Even though we did that last year.  And most of the friends that we invited were girls.  It's his favorite and that's what he wanted.  So I did it.  Again.  We held his party at my parent's house since we don't have much space at our little townhouse.  The kids had fun playing on our water slide, my parents swing set and running around.  The birthday boy requested pizza for dinner, so that's what we had.

i think the kids loved the water slide.  

we kind of ran out of time with the set up, but I had stuff to turn the orange construction cones on the eating tables into "cozy cone motels" with little awnings and signs, and then I was going to park a bunch of Zion's little cars around them.  This is as good as it got, though.

the best picture we got of the whole set up

present table

sarge's surplus food table-
with francesco's cheese pizza, mcqueen's pepperoni pizza, sally's green salad, and holly's fruit salad

flo's v8 dessert cafe-
with piston cup cupcakes, mater's tow ropes, guido's spark plugs and lug nuts, luigi's casa della tires, sherrif's traffic lights, ramone's body art samples, and mcmissle's spy cream...  you need to see the movies to understand how clever these are, and I only stole one of them from pinterest.  The rest I made up on my own.  Yep, I'm pretty proud of that.

I'm sad we didn't get a good picture of "fillmore's fuel station" (drinks).
I made cute little rusteez, dinoco and allinol labels for all of the drinks.

eating pizza with some friends

zion liked when everybody sang to him

blowing out his candle

opening presents

checking out the monster's playlet

piniata time

zion's lucky to have such fun friends

silly kids

my little family of 3... for a few more hours anyway

i love these girlfriends of mine, and that we all have 3 year olds!

I'm so thankful for all of the people that came and helped us make a special day for Zion.  I'm especially grateful to Zac and my family for helping me get everything set up.  I literally could not have done it all without them.

Zion has been such an amazing blessing in my life.  I am grateful for him every single day.  He says and does the funniest things.  I absolutely love the stage he is at right now.  If I could find a way to freeze time right now, I would.  He is the sweetest boy ever.  He is so easy going and hardly ever throws fits.  And when he does throw a fit, they only last for about 1 minute, until we explain to him why he can't do or have whatever it is that he's throwing the fit about, and then it's done and he's back to his happy self.  He has the best laugh.  It's truly my favorite sound in the world.  It comes from deep in his belly and lights up his whole face and everybody around him can't help but smile, too.  He is so nice to people.  I really don't think I have every seen him be mean to another kid.  If someone takes a toy from him, he just walks away and finds something else to play with.  He never hits or tries to steal it back.  Sometimes he gets a little rowdy with his friends and they will push and tackle each other, but it's always just playing and never in a mean way.  Zion is so smart.  I am amazed every single day by all of the things he knows and picks up on.  He has known his ABC's and all of the sounds they make for such a long time.  He loves to tell us what letter different words start with.  He can read and spell a bunch of words.  A lot of time he will say things like "thank you M-O-M!" or "I love you Z-A-C!" spelling out our names rather than saying them.  Yes, he's going through a stage right now where he thinks it is so funny to call Zac by his first name.  Zion knows how to count really well.  He can count to 30 by himself, but he also knows how to recognize 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100.  He just sometimes has a hard time counting all of the numbers in between.  He has picked up counting to 10 in Spanish, too.  As well as a few other Spanish words.  We can thank Dora for that, I'm sure.  He knows all of his shapes, colors, and loves to find patterns in different things.  He has a crazy good memory.  I'm serious.  Me and Zac just laugh because he remembers things way better than us.  For example... Last November we went to the new Lehi outlets.  When we took Zion to go to the bathroom, Santa Claus was seated inside the building that the restrooms are in.  The line was kind of long so we didn't wait to take a picture with him or say anything about it because we didn't want Zion to notice him.  Well he did.  9 months later, this past August, we pulled into the parking lot of the outlets for the first time since the previous November and the first thing Zion said was that he wanted to go see Santa.  He does things like this all the time.  At preschool his teachers have told us that they are blown away by how well he memorizes books and poems.

Zion, you are so amazing.  Not a day goes by that I don't feel absolutely blessed to have you in my life.  I love everything about you.  I promise I will always do my best to let you know how grateful I am for you and how much I love you.  I never want you to doubt my love for you.

(Sorry for the brag post, but I want to be able to remember these little details about Zion.)