Anna Grows

For those of you that were reading about Anna's 2nd birthday and thinking to yourself, "gee, Anna didn't even have a party," fear not! You can rest assured that Anna had two additional birthday celebrations courtesy of Ms. Be. The first celebration was held August 24 at a family picnic hosted by Ms. Be. August 24 happened to be Thomas' birthday (he is a couple of weeks older than Anna) so Anna and Thomas celebrated with cake and ice cream. The real treat for Anna at the picnic was not just the cake or the moonbounce with balls that Ms. Be had, but Anna's friend Brian's older 11-year old brother. Anna seemed quite taken with "Joe, Joe" and proceeded to follow-him around for most of the event. In the process, she managed to get Joe Joe to push her in the car and play basketball with her. It seems that Anna has already developed her mother's appreciation for more mature men. On August 29, Anna had her own party at Ms. Be's where she had the

Anna officially turned 2 years old on September 3. Many acquaintances have smiled knowingly when we told them she was about to reach this major milestone and commented, "ahhh....the terrible twos," as if they were in on some secret. We have news for them....Anna started the terrible twos at about 18 months. I believe the phrase that made us realize we had entered a new phase was "that's mine." For Anna's birthday this year we decided to take advantage of her pre-schools status and spend a week at the beach while all of the other kids were returning to school. This seemed like a good idea at the time....a relaxing stay at the beach fill with days of frolicking in the sand and waves. As always, things did not go according to plan. Things got off to a bad start on Saturday (we were scheduled to depart Sunday) when Mom enlisted Dad to assist in the ceremonial removal of the crib to be replaced by a "big girl" bed. The big girl bed of choice was an anti