Happy Birthday Emilie

It has been a year and we can hardly believe it. It is not possible that our little itty bitty Emilie is already a year old. And she is not itty bitty anymore. We are so grateful to have her in our family. She is such a joy and brings lots of happiness to our home. We are very blessed. She is our adventuresome little girl.

These first pictures are from today and the last couple of days. This one is right after nap. She still looks a little dazed. She starting to have a little girl look instead of the baby look. Features are becoming more defined in her little face.

Emilie with daddy on her birthday. He just woke up from his nap too.

Mom and Emilie on her birthday.

This is the best that we could do with Nicholas and Emilie. He had just woken up from a nap and wasn't cooperating. It didn't help that Emilie was pinching his back. She thought he had a shirt on or something.

This is the result of the pinching. We quickly got a shirt on him so he wouldn't be pinched anymore.

Just a cute little face.

Trying to eat mom's shirt sleeve. Not sure what she was doing that for.

Trying to get the sleeve again. Just shows what a happy little Emilie we have.

I had to include this because it was funny. She has discoverd some holes on her face too.

Attacking dad before bed on her birthday.

Some cute pictures from the last week. I think her face is so funny in this one.

This is her new favorite thing to do...push something around while crawling. She is pretty good at it too.

Posing.

It's hard to see, but when Emilie pulls this lever on the play table (which makes the train track in the center spin) she tenses up her little neck and gets all excited.

Yes, she has figured out how to climb into the drawers. This one happens to be where we keep all the kid bowls and plates...she obviously cleaned it out. Nicholas was a little concerned when she was in there. He said, "That's my drawer and she's going to break it. I don't want to have to go out tonight and get a new drawer"

We had Emilie's birthday party last Sunday because we had family in town that wouldn't be here this week and we wanted them to be part of the celebration. Thank you to everyone who came and celebrated with us. It was a lot of fun.

Here is the cake. It actually held up this time. It's definitely good to use the type of cake that is recommended. See picture below of what happened to Nicholas' ducky cake. We have decided to make it a tradition to have the ducky cake for each first birthday.

Ducky didn't cook all the way up into the second pan, so he was a little lopsided. It looked like he had his head cocked to the side looking at you. Still much better than below.

Here is what ducky looked like the morning of Nicholas' first birthday party. Not only did I not use the right type of cake, it had to be a red cake mix too look even worse. The joke was that he had been run over by a boat. It was very sad, but didn't make a difference in the end since it looked a lot worse when Nicholas got done with it. And it makes for good memories.

Being sung to. She was very tired, but still a pretty good sport.

It looked like she was going to attack the cake, but then....

She went about it in a very dainty way. Picking at it very lightly. We think that she might be a lefty. She is showing a preference to that hand when eating. One more attribute she got from daddy. That's at least three now: blue eyes, left hand, and very even tempered. There are many more, but those are some of the main ones.

She got a little messy, but it wasn't until later when I cut off some pieces that she got really messy.

She had lots of helpers that we were not able to keep back. We let them all pile in and get a piece of the duck. Notice the eyes are gone. The whole week before Nicholas was trying to get me to make two cakes so that he could have some too. He was afraid he wouldn't get any. And then that day, he kept asking if he could just have a piece before she got to it. At one point he said, "Can we just take the head off and I can have that part." A little morbid? Maybe he does remember his first birthday after all.

And the present opening begins.

Emilie receiving help from Nicholas. He was her biggest helper. He wanted to be in on all of the action.

Love this picture because the focus is on William, but we're over there opening presents.

Emilie was having a hard time focusing on the present opening. The other kids were bringing toys out of Nicholas' room and she thought those looked fun too.

Emilie ended the night with showing off her climbing skills by climbing on and into this toy that William let borrow since he is done playing with it for now. She learned her climbing skills at our friends house, they have little chairs for the kids and they were just the right height to try it out. Now, whenever she gets a chance, Emilie climbs into and on things.

Thanks again to everyone who made Emilie's first birthday special!