Give me 5 for Calista!

Calista turns 5-years-old today!!! She has been looking forward to this day for a long long time, probably about a year :), and I'm afraid that it will all start over again tomorrow!! We love our little Calista! Calista has been our most independent child. I don't think the words, "I'm too small" or "I can't do that" have ever been in her vocabulary. She was always the one to help all of her friends get their coats on, or get buckled. She learned to open her snacks before her older siblings, she's learned to read almost all on her own, and she's still eager to help Ellen do anything. We are so happy to have Calista in our family, and I hope this year will be a good one for her!!

Somehow we started a family tradition of waking everyone up early in the morning to sing happy birthday to the birthday kid. Luckily for us, they remind us the night before. It will be a sad day if we every forget. So this morning we woke everyone, except Sarah, up at 6:15am to sing to her. I really wanted to wait until after Seminary, but Calista would've been disappointed if she had woke up before we came in. Since we are all over our colds, Calista had a much better rendition of the song than Aaron had. The kids all looked tired, so we offered to let them go back to bed, but Calista figured that she could sacrifice her sleep to open presents!! So far she's gotten bunch of books and a couple new pairs of pants. My walking partner is going to be bringing a doll house later on. Her daughter had outgrown it and she was wanting to get rid of it, so she asked me about a month ago if we'd be interested. I think Calista will be excited!! Here are the books she got:

This book is an open the flap kind of book. It comes from the tv show word world where all the characters are formed by the spelling of their words: the frog's body spells out FROG and so on.

I've never seen a book like this. It's a veggie tale book about finding the best friend. Each page tells you about a different kind of friend: one that can make you laugh, one that's really smart, or one that's really brave. But which is the best kind of friend? On the opposite page is a puzzle to put together. At the end of the book you learn that friends are like puzzles. Each one is different and that's what makes them fit together so well! I love the lessons that veggie tales use, and I like all the different puzzles in this book. I think it has five different puzzles.

This is a magnetic book which came with 25 magnets. This is a Disney Look and Find book. It has a few items that you're supposed to find in the pictures, and then you're supposed to compare both pages to see what is different from one page to another. And then she also got a new coloring/activity book. The other day I cleaned out the bookcase. I saw several coloring books and started to get annoyed that they never used them. But then I decided to look in the books. They were all used up. There weren't any more pages to be colored. So we got another book!

I found these books at Albertsons in their bargain books box. It was my lucky day because they were all 50% off!!!