Thursday and Friday

We've had such a wonderfully busy 4 days that I'm going to break them up into Thursday/Friday and Saturday/Sunday.

Gaga arrived bright and early Thursday morning after flying in on a red-eye from San Francisco.
There's no rest for the weary in the Martinez Household and Ella was on her like white on rice the minute she arrived.

Thursday afternoon we had the YJCC's End of School Year Picnic. Ella had a blast.

Ella and Gaga walking in

First there was a concert put on by the Little Maestro's band. This is actually the band, yes BAND, that performs for the music classes that I'm taking with Sofia this summer while Ella is in camp. It includes a keyboardist, drummer, guitarist, and a lead singer. It's so awesome. I can't wait to do it with Sofia.

Ella loved it too (and so did the hysterically funny little boy in red in front of her!)

During the concert, Sam (Ella's friend Jordy's little brother) couldn't keep his eyes off of Sofia...or maybe it's her pretzel.

Naw, I think it was this face he couldn't stop looking at.

After the concert we went outside for the picnic. Ella just ran off and had a blast playing frisbee...look at that athleticisms-in air shot!

She then had a popsicle...or two.

The picnic was a blast and Ella had a great time.

Friday evening, Ricardo and I had the wedding of one Ricardo's close college friends, Tyson. Tyson and his now wife, Hannah live in NYC now, but a ton of Ricardo's old buddies from his SCU days were there. It was like a mini-reunion.

The wedding was AMAZING! Seriously, one of the most amazing weddings I've been too. I can't even bring it justice in this blog. It was at OHEKA CASTLE in Huntington, NY (Long Island). This place was beautiful and we had the ENTIRE castle to ourselves. The ceremony was outside, the cocktail reception was in one beautiful ballroom and included 8 appetizer stations, the dinner and dancing was in another ballroom, there was an entire room devoted to dessert which included (but was not limited to) wedding cake, chocolate covered strawberries, 8 different cheesecakes, a sorbet bar, freshly made crepes topped with rum covered bananas, and fresh fruit tarts. The evening ended with a walk across the grounds with sparklers to end in the library for after dessert cocktails.

It was such a great evening, in addition the breathtaking scenery and mouth water food, we were lucky enough to have great company. I always love being around Ricardo's college friends. Inevietably, Ricardo winds up in tears from laughing so hard.

Before we left Gaga tried to get a picture of Ricardo and I (btw, Ricardo did wear a tie, he just didn't put it on until we got there)...

But what you don't see in the above picture is this:

Awww, so of course we had to get a picture with her!

I tried getting pics with my pocket camera but they really don't do justice to this place, definitely take a look at the website.

When we walked in we were greated by this beautiful floral arangement, which was surrounded by our amazing placecards. They had gotten a picture of every singe guest and used it as our placecard instead of our name. It was amazing and I can't even imagine how much time this took. Luckily there were only 120 guests!

Here are our placecards. They took these pictures when they came to our house for Easter Sunday.

We then walked outside to the cermony location...breathtaking.

The new Mr. and Mrs. Brown


Our amazing centerpiece at dinner.

ok, something is up with blogspot and it took me 2 hours to post this (no lie). So I apologize for any typos but I just went a little blind trying to get this up (cue the violins) so I'm going to bed now! Saturday and Sunday (train ride to Hoboken and the Shore) coming up tomorrow, maybe more pics of the wedding if I can get the pics to load.

Ella's last day of preschool, sniff sniff

Today was the last day of preschool for the year. We had such a wonderful year AND a wonderful class. The kids really enjoyed each other and played together so well. And not that I'm biased, but I'm pretty sure we also had the best teachers in all the 2's classes. :)

I'm so thankful that I sent Ella to preschool this year. She has learned so much-both intellectually (is that possible at 2?) and socially. She now sleeps in a big girl bed and is fully potty trained and I really do think a lot of that is because she is the youngest in her class and saw the older kids doing so much.

When we left the house this morning for school, I said, Ella let me take a picture of you in your pretty dress, and the is what she did:

But then I tricked her and told her I put the camera away and it was time to get in the car and go to school. HAAA! Gotcha!

I dropped Ella off at 9:15 and then came back at 10:45 and the kids sang some songs for their moms (well the teachers did most of the singing).

Ella sitting on the rug with some of her classmates before singing commenced

Her fake "beaver" smile

Here they are singing a butterfly song (video gets boring after the butterfly song but I don't know how to edit it-sorry)

Ella took of her shoe mid-Bringing Home a Baby Bumblebee and just slid over to Fran to get her to put back on her shoe and continued to sing. Poor Jordy (sitting next to Ella) was sad that school was over.

Ring around the Rosie

After singing, they all went back to their snack table and got some ice cream and cookies. Yum!

We tried to get all the kids to sit down on the rug again with their teachers so we could get a class picture. If I didn't have enough respect for school photographers before, I do now. Wow, was the impossible.

As you can see, Ella is busy making Elephant noises.

After school, most of us met at a local park to play and have lunch. Unfortunately we couldn't stay long because we had to get back to let our sitter who was watching Sofia go, but we did play for a bit. It's nice that the kids enjoy each other so much.

Summer Camp starts in one week and Ella will have a blast there. They get to go swimming and on field trips and she's even going to eat lunch there! Such a big girl. It's going to be great, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little sad to see thee end of this wonderful year.