Annie's 1st Birthday, Presents & Party Snapshots

Opening presents in front of the gift givers always makes me a little nervous, but Annie was the sweetest, happiest, and most enthusiastic baby about every gift that she received!!  It was so much fun to give her each present and watch her reaction!

The first present that she saw was this Melissa & Doug shopping cart that Aunt Emmie bought for her! This was her reaction that I just happened to catch on camera!  I love this face!!

She didn't quite understand unwrapping gifts yet so I helped!

Brad and I gave Annie her first ever baby doll.  She is a sweet, little Corolle doll and Annie LOVES her!  She hugs the baby, carries her around, puts her paci in and out of her mouth, rubs her head, and pats her back!  I love how much she loves her baby!!

Finding the baby's eyes!

Aunt Nicole and Uncle Taylor gave her a new cell phone that she knew just what to do with!

JoJo and Grandpa gave her a popper that she also loves!!  I just love her expressions!

Aunt Emmie also had a board book made of "Annie's Family!"  It is so sweet and such a great idea!  We have enjoyed looking for each family member!

Wes, Sabrina, and Lynlee gave Annie a Cozy Coupe that she also loves!  I knew this would be a hit since Annie loves to drive so much!

Grandmommy & Granddaddy gave Annie this yellow school bus that she can "drive" and slide down the slide on.   At first, she was unsure of the slide, but now she loves it!  And after sliding down this slide, she has now tried out the big slide at the park and loved it too!

Annie received a few more presents that I do not have pictures of, but she has truly enjoyed everything and was glad to have some new toys I think!  Aunt Elizabeth & Uncle Alex gave Annie a great "Old MacDonald Tractor" that has farm animals that make noise and Old MacDonald who sings his song!  She loves this too!  We are so thankful for both of our families and great friends who were so generous to Annie!!  

And now, for the rest of the birthday pictures!  Just a few random snap shots from the afternoon!

The men manning the grill!

Enough pictures!!!! Let me go!

Snacking with Granddaddy!

Post-party wind down!

Lynlee has always loved Brad!

And, Uncle Jeffrey!!  We were so glad that he made it home from his Mystery EYC trip in time to join us for dinner and fun!  

So, as you can now tell, we had a GREAT day celebrating Annie's 1st birthday and it was very well documented too!!  Whew!  We all love you, Annie!!!

Annie's 1st Birthday, Cake Smash

Well, I just can't seem to get to the blog on a regular basis these days!  I have so many posts that I would like to share, but I am so behind.  I am going to finish up the birthday pictures this week so that I can hopefully catch up!

Here are the pictures from Annie's cake smash!  There were so many sweet ones so I just posted them all because I couldn't decided which were my favorites!

She was still pretty serious in all of these pics.  She was very animated while opening her presents but maybe this was a little overwhelming.  I don't know!

I love her little birthday hat!  She didn't love it at first but did get used to it long enough for pictures!  I also love the white, wooden high chair that a sweet neighbor let me borrow just for this occassion!

We started by singing Happy Birthday of course!

Then, Annie didn't hesitate to try her cake, but she was very neat and clean using just her little pincer grasp!  She is usually a very clean eater.

Beautiful baby girl!

"Mmmm, this is good!"

She decided all on her own to share a bite with her Daddy!

And then with her Mama!

And once she was finished, she let us know that she was all done and we could take her cake away!  Here she is trying to pick up her cake like she does with her plate when she is all done eating.

Sweet, sweet baby girl!  

Even though she didn't dive into her cake at her party, she continued to ask for bites of cake all week following her party.  She would walk over to the counter where the cake was sitting and ask for a bite a couple of times a day!  I, of course obliged because who doesn't love to eat their leftover birthday cake for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!!

Annie's 1st Birthday, The Decor and Pictures

On Saturday July 28th, Annie turned 1!! I really cannot believe that she is already 1!  I know that her birthday was a great day last year, and we were surrounded by all of our family, but I was recovering from my c-section which caused me to be a little out of it and in a lot of pain.  I am thankful that I was able to fully participate in all of the celebrations this year because we had such a great day!  It was fun that her birthday was on a Saturday so that we could have her party the same day!  Brad, Annie, and I started out the day with celebratory pancakes and the birthday song!  She loved us singing to her!   We played around the house while decorating for the party the rest of the morning.

For Annie's party, we hosted both of our families and Annie's Godparents at our house  and had such a fun day celebrating!

I knew that I wanted the party to have a "birthday theme" with lots of colors!  I also knew that I wanted to make fabric bunting for decorations.  So, with the colorful birthday theme and bunting in mind, I wrote this little poem after looking at invitations on the Internet.  Then, Emily made my vision a reality by creating these invitations on the computer.  She created the outline for the bunting and cupcake in grey lines and then we printed 10 invitations on basic card stock.  After printing, we hand painted each invitation with acrylic paints!  We had fun painting them and they turned out even better than expected! 

After the invitations were made and mailed, I picked out fabric to match for the bunting from Hobby Lobby.  I had great luck finding matching fabric!  After a lot of trial and error and brainstorming, Emily and I finally came up with the right size triangles and a plan for how to do the bunting.  Like everything in sewing, it seemed so much easier than it turned out to be.

After we had a plan, the bunting did go a little faster.  Emily cut triangles, I sewed them together, and then Brad trimmed each triangle with pinking shears to give them a finished edge.  Whew!  Once all of the triangles were made, we pinned them together with safety pins (on the back side) so that we could custom make each strand to fit each location.  Brad did almost all of the pinning and was a good sport - it was so tedious!  

I loved the way the bunting turned out!  It made very festive and colorful decor just like I had hoped!  Thank you Brad and Emily for all of your help - it would not have gotten done without each of you!

Saturday morning, Brad and I put up all of the decorations.  We hung the create-your-own birthday banner with "Happy Birthday Annie" on the back porch for the cake smash and for all the photos with the birthday girl!  My neighbor let me borrow the white, wooden high chair!

I also made the big cake and Annie's smash cake!  They were just Duncan Hines Butter Fudge Chocolate cake mixes from a box, but I always think they are delicious!  Friday night, Emily and Elizabeth came over to help me decorate which was a bit intimidating!  Emily made 3 huge batches of butter cream icing that were delicious!  Then, we set to work on coloring the icing.  We had fun mixing to get the different colors!

Thankfully, with the help of Emily and Elizabeth, the cakes turned out great!!  I thought they were so festive, and we all thought they were delicious!  Thank you Elizabeth and Emily for your help - I loved having your help and your company!

Inside we hung Annie's monthly photos!  We all had fun seeing her progression from newborn to chunky 6 month old to slimmed out big girl at 12 months!

We just had bean dip and watermelon during the party since everyone stayed for a cook out afterwards!

When everyone arrived, Annie was actually still asleep!  I decided not to wake her since it was her party!  Once she was awake, we took tons of pictures with everyone!  

Unfortunately, we didn't catch any smiles in our pictures since Annie was still waking up!  She was in a good mood but still sleepy headed.

I was so excited with how pretty and colorful all of our pictures turned out, but I do wish I had used clear fishing wire on the birthday sign instead of the white ribbon.  Too many strings coming out of our heads.  Ha!

We missed Uncle Jeffrey at the beginning of the party.  He joined us later after being on an EYC Mystery trip!

I have lots more pictures of Annie opening presents and eating her cake!  More to come in the next post!