Lily & Leo

Happy 3rd Birthday to my sweet wonderful Lily pad! Lily weighs 27 pounds (only gained 4 pounds this entire year) and is 37 inches tall, both in the 13th percentile range.  Her hemoglobin levels dropped from last year down to 11.3, on the low side so she needs to have more iron intake, more fish it is!!  Haha.  There’s actually a lot of foods rich in iron like red meats, pork, poultry, seafood, beans, dark leafy greens, dried fruits, and certain cereals breads and pastas!  She pretty much just needs to eat more in general, but she’s so energetic she just runs around and burns it all off.  Less play, more eating Lily haha! She’s small for her age but definitely big in personality and maturity.  She’s so smart, spunky, and sassy and is constantly surprising us with her level of understanding and awareness of our world. (Thank you so much Mieng for these beautiful pictures of my Lily pad!!)

A couple weekends before her birthday, we had a small lunch at Favori with both of our immediate families to celebrate Lily’s birthday since we didn’t throw Lily a party this year.  Then on her birthday weekend, we took her Balboa beach where there is this nice little playground on the sand that Lily likes to play at.  She loves to climb up the ladders now and go down the big kid’s swirly slide and repeat those things all day long!  She also likes to look at the water and run towards it and away from it, over and over again.  Digging in the sand for hidden treasures is also a favorite beach activity of hers and pointing out all the seagulls and birds that fly by as well.

As you all know, Lily’s little brother Leo made his special and amazing arrival the day before her birthday.  So unfortunately we couldn’t continue her birthday weekend as planned, but I still wanted to make sure I do something special on her actual birthday.  I told Khoa to bring some presents that I had for her to the hospital, to let her open and I also made her a cake that is her favorite by far!  She doesn’t really eat cake or cupcakes much, so I decided to fill a glass with her favorite sweets, crispy M&Ms, skittles, and red vines and stuck a sparkly candle on top!  I’m pretty sure the hospital would not approve of the open flames…but we did it quick so they don’t know, and we were safe about it haha.  Plus, Lily LOVED it and that made me super happy.  Her face lit up when she saw the bowl of candy and she was even more excited when she saw how sparkly the candle was!  So that was a big success!

Thank you to everyone who sent her birthday presents as well!  I’m so touched by everyone who took the time to remember Lily’s birthday and shower her with love even though you can’t be here in person to see her and celebrate with her.  This birthday is special, not just because she got a new baby brother!!  So it was very important to me to make sure to make her feel loved and special even though there’s this new amazing change in all our lives.  So thank you everyone for helping me make her feel special.  I know it’s just presents, but to a little 3 year old, it’s much more than that.

We had a special celebration at LePort for Lily’s birthday as well, and we brought in fruit filled cookies from Trader Joe’s and cut up some strawberries for the kids for the special snack.    I also bought some minion themed party favors to pass out to the kids as well since Lily loves minions right now!  I bought plastic favor cups, bubble wands, super bouncy balls, stickers, and organic fruit snacks.  I made thank you favor tags as well and tied them to the bubble wands with yellow ribbon to complete the package!  Lily and her friends loved them!  It was really cute and impressive to watch Lily set up the table for snack time and sit at the table and eat her snacks so well.  She was so good at cleaning up after herself and then saying goodbye to us without a fight!  I was so impressed with her maturity, it made me proud and also a little emotional that she’s growing up so fast.

I cannot believe my precious Lily pad is now 3 years old!  Seeing my Lily pad happy makes me so happy, and knowing that I was a part of making her happy, just makes me feel so wonderful inside.  I feel like she’s so smart and advance for a three year old, she speaks so well with multiple complete sentences and has such a wide range of vocabulary.  She is so observant of her surroundings and is so intuitive to emotions as well.  She’s majorly sweet and is a naturally caring and nurturing person, proven by the way she treats her baby brother Leo.  I cannot be more proud of my Lily pad and I look forward to watching her continue to grow into such a beautiful lady, both inside and out.  I love you soooo much Lily, you light up my life, you make me and your daddy so happy, you are so amazing and beautiful, you are everything worth living for my love.  Happy 3rd Birthday my precious Lily pad!!  You can see more pictures from Lily’s birthday festivities HERE!  Below is also a video I made of some fun happy silly loving moments with Lily in the past year!! Enjoy!