My baby turned 6 years old today!

I saw it coming when Nick turned 9 this year, but now my baby girl is 6 years old, and that means I really don't have any babies left. Crazy! It's all gone by so fast. Here are some pics of Bella's first 6 years....

Bella helped continue the line of women in my family, becoming the fourth generation of Gifford ladies in this picture. Here is my Grandma Beth, Mom Nancy, me, (Nick, but lets not count him in with the ladies, huh?)...and Bella.

Baby Bella...yep, that's her own foot she's chewing on. I promise I fed her well...

Bella loved and still loves to play in the sand. She loves to dig, bury, hide and find anything she can get her hands on. She also loves to help grandma in the garden. Her favorite thing to do is pick strawberries.

Me and my little baby girl in Denver. This is before she had her front four teeth capped. I love that smile!!!

Grandpa made Bella a special elephant cake. Elephants are her favorite animal, of course. She also loves the color purple. But when asked what color she wanted grandpa to make the elephant, she replied with a very simple "Gray, of course". What other color would an elephant be???

Here is mom and the birthday girl at her special birthday lunch at Olive Garden. She picked out that sash from the party store and insisted on wearing it to school. Fine with me. It went great with the giant crown they gave her in class. And of course, she would need to wear it to lunch and everywhere else that day, too. Diva.

Dad and the birthday girl.

She got a special birthday sundae and they even sang to her! She was so excited :-)

Bella's list of birthday wishes included going to Kangaroo Zoo, which she did later that evening with a few friends and Nick, have a cake with animals on it (because she's going to be a vet someday)...check--see below--, and she wanted a red wagon (which grandpa got her) and a Barbie bike (which she is both on and hugging, shown above). Lucky girl, she got all of the above. Because no one can say no to HRH Isabella...

Here is the "zoo" cake we got for her. It had to be green "so it looks like the animals are playing in the jungle".

And here is the crew for the evening. We sent out the invites a little late, but she still had four friends able to come to the party (one isn't pictured because she met us at Kangaroo Zoo and we had to do cake and presents first at home). And that's plenty when it comes to six-year-olds.

Happy Birthday, Bella. We all love you so much!

Spring Break

If you live in Utah, you know what a strange spring break we had last week, weather wise. Mother Nature decided to show us a little bit of each season, and I guess that's fine with me because we hadn't made any major plans to go anywhere. We decided that we would do something fun each day since we weren't going on vacation. We had a Chuck E Cheese day, a movies day, a Thanksgiving Point day, etc. Some of the plans fell through because I worked a lot last week and had a hard time doing everything on our list, but I think the kids had a good break. Here's a little of what we did:

Of course, the week started off with Easter Sunday. The kids had slept over at grandma and grandpa's the night before and had a lot of fun over there, and even got great Easter baskets from them. When they got home, they found that the Easter Bunny had left them some giant chocolate bunnies.

Then, this happened. And I said to myself "Only in Utah would you have to worry about throwing down some ice melt during spring break".

But later in the week, the sun came out again, and we got to spend a day at the park. I love this view. You can see the houses down the hill, Utah Lake, and the beautiful mountains and blue sky behind it all.

Nick and Bella even got to ride their scooters to the park. They loved it, and of course Nick the Dare Devil had to go up and down the hill as many times as he could until we caught up with him.

I can't believe how tall Bella is getting. I was following them and just thought "When did my kids grow up?" It amazes me every day.

Cute girl. Always posing.

Here's Nick, being Nick.

They are so quick to make up stories and adventures. I just sat back and watched them act it all out.

The Fatafehi kids, conquering the playground...

And in hopes of spring, I decided to get a couple highlights. I was surprised when I looked in the mirror to see a ton of very light blond streaks throughout my hair. This was the first stylist who was bold enough to not just do some baby-fine light brown highlights, and I decided to follow in her boldness and just roll with it.

Happy Spring!

Michael Buble concert!

So, I finally had a chance to download all these pics from the concert (I worked every night after the concert except for Sunday up until this morning, so I am just now recovered enough to function!) If you read my previous blog entry, you'll notice that I have many pics from before the concert, but my camera died as our Mikey walked onto stage... sad, I know, but luckily, my aunts were sitting on the 18th row on the floor (lucky ladies!) so I stole a few good concert pics from Bev's Facebook page (Thanks Bev!). Enjoy....

Here's me and Mellie, very excited to be at the E Center and about to find our seats!!!

This is the set up before the concert...I love that they thought we were special enough to put our initials up on the big screen. Welcome Melanie and Brittney (MB)...heehee...

Here is the disco ball that hangs from the ceiling of the E Center...I don't know, I thought it was amusing...

A little smooch for luck before the concert...

What a hot mama...sucks having friends who are so much more photogenic than you are. But I love this pic, go Mellie, go Mellie!

This poster thing wasn't securely fastened and it kept moving if you touched it even a little bit. And you know we probably touched it a little bit. :-)

Here are some wonderful pics from Bev, I'm so glad she got some good ones I could steal...yum.

Such a great show, he could have just sat there on that stool all night and serenaded us, and I would have been just fine with that. Amazing voice.

Workin it...

No words needed....

Two very happy ladies, indeed. Such a great night. I have a few more pics on my phone, including a video of the trumpet soloist who performed just a couple stairs above us at the end of the show, so I'll post those here soon. It was such a fun night and amazing concert.

Murphy's Law renamed....

Growing up, we were taught about Murphy's Law...except it was known as "The Price Curse" to us. It's a little gloom and doom unless you see it our way. You just have to assume that the weirdest, messed up version of what could possibly happen will actually happen. That way, you aren't surprised, you just laugh it off and know that it means you are a "true Price". I was hoping this would magically go away when I changed my name, but sadly, its genetic and my children inherited it too. Here are a couple examples of what I'm talking about.

* It apparently carries over if you marry into the family- When Jack and Amy got home from their honeymoon, Jack was being the nice new hubby and attempted to carry Amy over the threshold of their apartment. Jack should have seen this coming, since he had 26 years of the Price curse, yet he clearly wasn't thinking straight...They have a cute pic of the two of them just outside the door, but immediately following that, he knocked her head on the doorway and almost dropped her. Welcome to the family Amy...

* My camera died just as Michael Buble stepped onto the stage. Yep. I said it. That's why there aren't going to be a lot of great Buble pics on my blog as promised. I was so distracted by the events of the day that I forgot to check the battery life on my camera. I took pics of me and Mellie before the concert, a couple videos of the amazing opening act, and as Mike stepped onto the stage, the camera shut down and wouldn't even turn back on. So sad, but I couldn't act surprised, I had to expect it. But what I didn't expect was that it would carry over to Melanie too. She went to turn on her camera, just to find out that it too was dead. The Price curse has gotten stronger, look out my friends!!!