Well, it's been close to a week since Amanda's birthday and I haven't posted about it yet- sigh. We really had a nice time. I won't take time to blog about the weekend before her birthday but in a nutshell we took her out to dinner along with Nanni, Poppi, and Taylor (boyfriend). So on the actual day Taylor picked her up from school and I scrambled to buy presents, food and bake a cake. Travis grilled burgers and I almost didn't know what to do with myself since I wasn't cooking. So we had dinner, did presents and were lighting the candles on the cake when we heard a scream from the living room. Since a lot of people that already read this blog have been on the phone with me lately and since I get a knot in my stomach talking about it I'm just going to sum this up. Travis ran into the living room to find Halle with a pencil in her hand and blood pouring from her mouth. We finally figured out that she had the eraser end of the pencil (the eraser had been chewed off by Chloe just leaving the metal exposed) in her mouth and slipped while climbing on the chair. The next several hours were spent waiting on the Dr. to call to tell us if we needed to go to the emergency room, getting Chloe off to the Fadely's and waiting in the emergency room. No stitches, an inch or so long gash in the roof of her mouth, antibiotics and pain medicine with a narcotic in it. She's doing better but she's still in pain. I'm anxious to not talk about this again.
Moving on...I don't know if you can tell what it is because the picture doesn't highlight it but Travis drew a flower on Amanda's birthday cake! I was proud of him.

The next picture is Halle's artwork on my artwork and the last picture is the finished
product. There are a couple of touch-ups that I need to make (I don't like my signature) and then I need to put varnish on it and I'm done. Then I was reading on about.com about painting and she said that you should be working on more than one thing at a time to keep your perspective and if you get stuck on one thing you can move on to the next- so I started 4 more paintings. One is a watercolor and I don't think I'm going to like it so I don't know if I'm going to bother with it.

And I'm behind on everything because of Halle's accident, then the women't conference, church, and the main street festival in Franklin...so now I'm off to clean.