Richard, Dana Lynne, Jillian, and Everett Too!

When Jillian woke up on the morning of October 3rd - on her 3rd birthday - she realized that Bashful Heart Bear was hiding in her bed from another night...she was pretty excited that she had TWO friends in her bed! Just another cute thing we observed...

After Richard and I took Jillian to her Friday morning ballet class (Richard has made it clear that the "waiting room" at ballet class - where you can watch the girls on TV monitors - is NO place for a man!). I feel for him...honestly, it's not a place I particularly enjoy. I want to be there simply to watch Jillian on the monitor. I could easily do without the constant chatter of moms (I'm just not one to want to talk about "my kid is doing this, your kid is doing that..." or to sit there for what could otherwise be a relatively quiet 30 minutes, but that is filled with sounds of home-schooled kids and their electronic, educational toys they're constantly playing with...can you tell I'm NOT a morning person???)

Anyway, after class, we headed home, changed Jillian into some different clothes and told her we were going to a "Surprise Birthday Place"...she followed this up with, "What's the surprise placed called?" We told her that it's a "mystery" - that that's part of what makes it a surprise..."what's a mystery? what's the mystery called?"

Eventually, we got to our first destination: McDonald's. Jillian had the rare treat of a Happy Meal, but the first thing she requested was her apples and milk! YAY!!! She only wanted 2 chicken nuggets...double YAY!!!

Then, it was off to get some gas in the car and a drive down to Dallas with her new Birthday-themed My Little Pony (she found it in a birthday bag from Mommy and Daddy at the breakfast table earlier that morning)...

A while later, we arrived at our "surprise/mystery" destination:

The Dallas World Aquarium was a place that neither Richard nor I had ever been before, and we thought that Jillian would really enjoy it.

Turns out, she did enjoy it - just not in the way that we expected. More on that in a bit.

Saying "hi" to the penguins.

Jillian thought this little bird was pretty entertaining.

Seeing a sloth up close and personal was REALLY neat! They move in a very "animatronic," slow motion way...unfortunately, while Richard and I were really fascinated by the sloth and enjoyed watching him/her move in such an interesting way, Jillian was practically yelling in the background, "I wanna see more animals!!!!"

So we proceeded on and saw this orange, little monkey guy...taking it in for all of 5 seconds, Jillian said, "I wanna see more animals!"

Sleeping sloth, followed by Jillian's favorite sentence of the day (don't think we didn't try to get Jillian to STOP saying this...we DID! We tried to convey to her that we were taking our time and enjoying watching the animals.)

Turtle family :)

Duck...

HUGE fish!

Manatee.

The second Jillian saw the very foreign looking animal pictured above, she said, "Octopus!" when we asked if she knew what it was...we were pretty impressed - it looked very little like what she sees in books (especially as it "climbed" up the side of a wall).

Out of all of the animals Jillian saw, she seemed to be the most content watching the flamingos...

However, that didn't change the fact that she didn't really want to take any pictures...

Soon, we reached the end of the trail and it was time to head back to the car...

...where Jillian promptly passed out, as we drove to have a birthday dinner at Red Robin.

Here she is, fully alert after her nap, and practicing her coloring skills:

Very focused on coloring...

This is Jillian as she's telling me, "No pictures!"

She was very excited to see Red Robin when we told her that's where we would be eating...so when Red Robin (the person dressed as such, walking around the place) wasn't there, this was the next best option.

Jillian enjoyed hearing the waiters sing "Happy Birthday" to her! When our waitress asked Jillian what her name was before they sang, Jillian said, "Munchkin!" We had to remind her that that's just what Mommy and Daddy (sometimes) call her.