Little Miss Mantha

From this...

To this...

in two short years!

I can never get over how fast time flies. My baby is already two years old! It was funny to me how different she looked on Wednesday, the day before her birthday, compared to Thursday. Suddenly she looked so much more like a toddler and less like a baby. And suddenly her tantrums got so much more volatile, too! She's always had a bit of a temper, but it flares up then dissipates much faster now. Last night she got mad for some unknown reason and she actually jumped into the air, both feet off the ground, kicked both legs out and sat down hard on the kitchen floor. Then she sat there and screamed. When no one did anything, she repeated the maneuver. Still no one did anything, so she climbed up on her chair and started eating her dinner. Less than a minute later she was laughing and making animal sounds with Drew and Owen. Silly girl.

We didn't have Mantha's birthday party until Friday, the day after her birthday, because of conflicts with work, soccer and volleyball games. Good thing she's too little to know the difference. I snapped a few pictures of Mantha on her actual birthday, for my own sentimental reasons. Here they are:

In the playhouse.

Coloring in the fresh air.

Special birthday hairdo.

I had a lot of fun making Samantha's birthday cake this year. I wanted to do a Samantha Cake, so my sister Roz helped me find pictures to copy. I liked this one the best:

I wanted the cake to be just about Samantha, though, so when I copied the picture I left out the little boy.

First, I sketched the outline in the frosting with a toothpick.

Then I traced over the outline with black icing.

I added stripes around the edges to sort of complete the old-fashioned look, and to add a "pop of color," as they say on What Not To Wear. It didn't look exactly like the original picture, but I was pretty pleased with how it turned out.

Samantha liked it, too!

Samantha liked her presents, too. She was so funny when we took her to the store to pick a toy. We would show her a toy and ask, "Do you like this one, Samantha?" and she'd say, "Nooooo," then she'd laugh and run to the next toy. There was a little learning center that she played with the most, so that's what we got her.

She also got some new clothes and a new bed from Grandma and Grandpa Canfield! She loves it now, but when we first set it up and showed it to her, she started crying and wouldn't go near it because she thought we meant for her to go to bed, and she'd just woken up from her nap twenty minutes before! I don't have a picture of the new bed; it's a very cute antique bed that Grandma C. fixed up and bought bedding for. Samantha got sick last night, though, and all that adorable bedding is in the wash so I'll have to get a picture some other time.

If anyone needs a crib or know someone who does, let me know. We have two cribs, but only one mattress (one of the mattresses was really old and falling apart so we junked it).