Happy Birthday Megan

Megan's Birthday was this past weekend and we had a blast. My mom was a huge help with getting the house ready and helping with the cake! Michael's parents provided food we ate and cooked it as well! We are so blessed to have such loving parents! Thanks to all of you, it really meant a lot to have your help!

Megan had an absolute blast at her party. She loved the attention of course and she really got into the presents and saying "thank-you". It was great to see everyone that came and we missed those who couldn't be here. It's hard to believe that Megan is 2 now!

Here are the guys (mainly Norm) bbq'ing lots and lots of brauts for Megan's party. They were definitely yummy!

Megan's Presents

Megan was spoiled rotten for her birthday! We got her the trike and helmet, it's such a cool bike, and only $10 more than the little cheaper ones at walmart! Unfortunately she hasn't fell in love with it yet, we know she will though! Megan got all kinds of cool toys, play-doh, clothes, shopping cart, backpack, book, wand, pig, fureal puppy, toy minivan, people for the minivan, puzzles and everything inbetween! Thank you to everyone that came and to those who couldn't come but sent gifts and good thoughts our way! The following pictures are just a few of the cool pictures that we have of her gifts.

Megan's Birthday Cake

Here are pictures of Megan's birthday cake. She loves Dora and we decided to go for a Dora theme. My mom and I came up with the idea of a road and we loved how it all turned out! Of course Megan's cake was a smaller cake that had Swiper the Fox on it, she wasn't too sure of it at first!

Random Pictures!

Here are some pictures of Megan. I am trying to get everything updated by her party Saturday!

My mom and Megan are having a blast together. Megan found many treasures at my mom's yardsale! The jewlry in this picture, the bowl in the next one, and some lovely sunglasses in another!

Here is Megan enjoying playing with her animals. She gets the container of plastic animals out everyday!


Here she is with her Dora hat I found at a yardsale...it is now in the top of her closet because she wanted to wear it 24/7 and that's just not possible with the heat right now!

We were walking around downtown with Megan in the stroller during the 4th of July, she didn't look too happy though!

Cheeeese!

Ahh, the sandbox. Megan is a funny kid. She seems to be a bit of a scaredy cat. We unveiled her sandbox that grandpa Dierking worked on for her and she didn't exactly love the sand. She made her grunting I'm annoyed sound until I found the bags to put under her! Then she tolerated it for a bit longer. Unfortunately she hasn't went back in there yet but soon we are hoping, maybe at her party!

Out at Grandma and Grandpa Dierking's

Megan stayed with g-ma and g-pa Dierking the weekend we painted and she had a blast. She painted a Father's Day card, made brownies, played in the water, swang, fed the kitties and much more! Here are just a few of those activities in pictures!

Here is what Megan and I made for Daddy. I printed 3 pages of small pictures from our computer (just black and white) and Megan decorated the posterboard with marker, lots of circles. It was complete with a singing card in the middle!

Another weekend, here we are helping to put together the massive treehouse that Norm is building. It's going to be great and the kids are going to love it! He found cedar trees and cut them down, brought them up and put them in cement so everything should be really secure!

Here is Megan in their awesome swing, she really loves to go high and the way they have it set up she can twist around and around! We like this picture because it's kinda goofy with Uncle Jon!

Here are just a couple of pictures of the destruction that Michael and Jon did during Fourth of July. It seems to be a yearly tradition to blow things up! The boat started out complete with 3 masts, they put tanks on the side to blow a hole through it and then once that happened they put bottle rockets through it, the bottle rockets somehow ended up sticking out the front, it was neat!

Family Reunion

We had the Dierking/Lohrmann Family Reunion in June and I'm finally getting around to blogging about it! We had a wonderful time at the Pere Marquette Park in Illinois. Because it is set right on the Mississippi flooding made things a little more interesting. We ended up with a great room with a water view! It was great to see family that we had not seen for a year or so and some not for 3 years. The reunions are every 3 years and we are already excited about the next one!

Megan is loving the water. Here she did great in the water with someone holding her...until she had more fun dumping water from the pool into a drain on the deck! We had a swim class-water adjustment that was for babies and toddlers. Unfortunately she didn't enjoy them at all, we tried it three days in a row and the second day she enjoyed about 5 minutes of it and then started screaming again. The third day after only being in the pool for 5 minutes she screamed and screamed so we left. At this point I felt the classes were doing more harm than good because she absolutely loves the water...when she can just walk and sit and play. We'll see what happens next year!

Random Pics

Mommy's Little Helper

Megan loves to help out whenever she can...especially when there is water involved! This was my first attempt with her helping with the dishes. She liked it so much that she threw a big fit when it was time to stop!

Paint Before and After Pictures

We painted several weekends ago with the help of Michael's parents. Megan went to their house for the weekend and we painted and painted and painted...and we were only able to get 3 rooms done! When Megan left she simply said bye-bye to us and couldn't wait to go with grandma. Needless to say that was a little hard but we know it's for the best that she can separate easily with those she knows real well.

Originally we were going to paint all of the trim so we sanded them down and this is Megan helping! She really enjoyed sanding but wanted to sand every surface, walls, cabinets, herself! When it came down to it the trim was too time consuming for our taste so we just painted Megan's room with white trim, we really like how her room turned out. We have butterfly's to hang and pictures to put up so I will post a final picture once we get to that!

We forgot to take a before picture of our room so here is Megan in our room so you can get the gist of it. We like how it turned out so that's good. We will eventually put pictures up and change the bedding/curtains but it's fine for now with paint on the walls!

I will post pictures from the basement and living room once I take the after pictures!