Emma is TWELVE!!

This is my adorable oldest, Emma Suzanne. She was 4 in these photos, but today she is 12!! She has grown so much and is such a wonderful young woman. Yesterday was her actual birthday and she had her FIRST SLEEPOVER. She's slept at a very limited amount of friends/families houses, but this is the first time she had a group of friends sleep at our house. I had my trepidation, but it has been a blast.


I am pleasantly surprised at Emma's friends. It appears that she's found a group of girlfriends at school that have parents as strict as I am. They spent some time trying to decide who's parents were the most strict last night, comparing when they'll be allowed to read TWILIGHT, watch PG-13 movies, talk to boys on the phone, etc. I'm glad to know that she has friends with parents that set limits. She had 2 school friends and 2 church friends over and all of them are well behaved and FUN. I stayed up until midnight, laughing at their antics. Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of their skits, charades, and games. I did take some this morning of their home-made mask inventions:

Natalia (banana oatmeal), Sarah (avacado lime), Aven (strawberry banana), Emma (strawberry oatmeal) and Jordan (banana lime)

They laughed so hard as the masks they applied fell all over their clothes/the floor. I just followed behind with a mop.

When they washed the masks off, they all stroked each others faces, declared themselves genius mask makers and wrote down each other's "recipes." Pretty cute stuff.

It has been fun having these girls over. They all had a great time together and I hope we'll be hosting more birthday sleepovers in the years to come. I like the way 12 year olds act. And I like the taste of the strawberry banana mask.