First Birthday Party!

You know what's great about 1 year olds? They have no idea when their birthday is, so when everyone gets sick, it's not a big deal to shift that party to the next weekend.

You know what else is great about them? They have no idea what presents are, so when their 3 year old brother is completely losing his marbles about festively wrapped packages he's not supposed to touch, you can relent halfway through the party and let him unwrap everything while she sleeps in a cake coma.

That about covers it. Oh yeah, they're pretty cute too.

even when they have chocolate all over 'em

and especially if I'm not holding them. (Thanks, Mere!!)

90% asleep

The unwrapping

100% asleep

The table of snacks and cake. We had a polka dot theme. A whole platter of candy dots, a jar of M&Ms...

Plus Kix and Trix and Rainbow Chex Mix, which was astonishingly easy to make and came out beautiful and delicious! The polka dots on the cake are more M&Ms...

#Pinterestwin!

Note that everything has now been crammed together in the middle of the table. It was very very hard not to touch the cake. Very hard.

Why is everyone looking at me?

I wonder what the neighbors are doing?

Polka dot cascarones

I was super proud of my balloon chandelier, so I took way too many picture of it. I got a huge crochet hoop at Goodwill a while back, (like, 18 inches in diameter maybe?) and that thing has been great fun. It was the crow's nest for Austin's pirate party, with some black cloth and skeletons. For this, I tied ribbons all around the inner hoop and then tied balloons on the ribbons and then slid them around until it looked dense enough. Then I put the outer hoop on and suspended it from our chandelier over the table. Very easy! And when Daddy took it down, he put the balloons to good use in the play pen.

The fungeon

Labor Day!

Well, you wouldn't know it from the photos, but we had some kind of bug this weekend. Little dude was hot and fevery on Friday and Saturday, had a cough Saturday but only at night today. So he was not his usual boisterous self and we spent a lot of time watching Octonauts and whining. Octonauts is kind of our new thing, and we spent about two days watching it, which averages to three viewings of all the episodes on the DVR. But averages don't matter here, because we watched our favorites about 8 times each. Go ahead, ask me about The Great Penguin Race.

Anyway, Labor Day was actually great, even though the Sophieloaf is still awake.

And crawling!

No, wait, she's standing!

And we got a shot of Sophie with her first rainbow!

It's sort of an ongoing project of Mom's to recreate photos we took of Austin with Sophie. It's not something I do a ton of, but it is fun, kind of like a treasure hunt. Here's Austin's "first rainbow picture" from February 2011.







Anyway, we had a great Labor Day. Although neither Mom nor Dad got much of a day off...

And we did get one raised bed built and filled and planted with a little bit of a practice garden, since it's really late in the season. Austin had fun watering!

 And we enjoyed having a little time outside after being cooped up so long.