Good Bye Baby!

Our baby girl turned ONE on Saturday! I truly can't believe it- where did the time go? Between a very difficult recovery time after her birth, adjusting to life with 2 girls, post-partum brain fog and funk, and then her being very clingy to Mama and not eating solid food until 9 months old.... I really didn't feel like I settled down to just ENJOY her until about 3 months ago. Of course there were lots of good times before that, but they were sometimes overshadowed by the challenges. For the past few months she has just blossomed! She is scooting around all of our furniture, so she'll be walking before we know it. She also crawls all over this place, sometimes with a toy in each hand. She is trying to say a few words (in order of appearance): Dada, Snack, Mama, Night Night.... snack is the funniest one because for a kid who wouldn't eat until 9 months she surely loves her food and snacks now. She has such a fun personality, smiling and laughing much of the time. Her big sissy makes her laugh the most and she always has. Big sissy also aggravates her quite regularly too, but G will not be pushed around and often squeals when she's being bothered.

We had a great birthday party on Saturday! We had mostly family and a few friends join us. The highlight for me was having my mom and grandma here for the week. It's very rare for someone in our home to celebrate a birthday with any of my family here. The weather was gorgeous and the kids played outside most of the day. We had a nice BBQ, complete w/ chicken, sausage, baked beans, potato salad, bread, iced tea, and lemonade... If you can't be in the south you might as well pretend that you are, right??

We had some fun games for the party: Guess the number of star snacks in the baby jar- a nod to G's favorite snacks. G can and can't game- a list of items that people had to guess whether she could or couldn't do yet. The older kids enjoyed a cupcake shaped pinata and pin the cherry on the cupcake games, too.

We had a giant cupcake shaped cake that I made. I enjoy making cakes since I took a few Wilton classes when we were first married. I'm no professional, but the ones I make for our family usually come out pretty cute. PARTY TIP: I always hate serving ice cream at parties b/c it's messy and time consuming. This time I bought little cups of ice cream, but I recently read a cute idea. Take muffin tins, line with muffin cups, put a scoop of ice cream in each cup and place back in the freezer. When it's time to serve remove from the freezer and voila!

Soooo....that's the run down on the birthday bash. One day I will figure out how to get some pictures on this blog and share some of the big day with you all.