6-month ice cream party

this gal is 7 months old... seven months. i thought it was just february last week? where does the time go?

anyway, my husband's family has a fun tradition that his grandparents started, where they always celebrate the babies' 6-month birthdays with an ice cream party :) now, i'm normally a more health-conscious mom, i guess you could say. with my first daughter it was all i could do not to burst inside when she dug into that mountain of sugar. basically, in my mind, that much sugar = poison.

luckily, for my own sanity's sake, i've lightened up a lot. 

so little Tessa dug into her ice cream sundae this a couple weeks ago 

[it was a few weeks after her actual 6-month birthday but she'll never know the difference].

i think it's safe to say she liked it. she was screaming at me between bites. i couldn't shovel it in fast enough:

and she got to open some cute little gifts and ride on the quads with daddy

and now i'm remembering i really need to write those thank you notes...

couldn't have been a better evening. the big kids went back to school the next day 

so hopefully it was sort of like a last hurrah for them. i don't have any pictures of all the kids, 

but it's always a lot of fun when the cousins get together.