Happy Happy Birthday

Josie turned one last week, which leads me to wonder how on earth an entire year has passed since she was born. I have no idea what happened! I missed several months' worth of sleep, changed a few diapers, and now she's a toddler. Kind of.

To celebrate, I started off the day by vacuuming. The girls are both deathly afraid of our vacuum cleaner, so here they are protecting each other from it on the couch.

We had a party that evening when both sets of grandparents joined us for dinner and birthday cake. When the girls were napping, I transformed the living room into the party room by putting up a little birthday banner and blowing up some balloons to spread out on the floor. Holly ran around shrieking, "It's a party! It's a party!" and Josie was more subtle but equally thrilled. It was so much fun to see them play with the balloons and have a blast.

Josie's little baby cake. That lone sprinkle in the middle of the cake is driving me crazy!

The big cake for the rest of us. In case you cannot tell, the cake itself is pale pink. It's a vanilla cake with vanilla bean buttercream, heavy on the butter. It was actually quite delicious. I'm not entirely pleased with the non-smoothness of the frosting, but my only tool was a butterknife. So I think I did rather well, no? (Help! I need an offset spatula but I'm too cheap to go out and buy one.)

Josie not eating her birthday cake. She was incredibly skeptical of the entire thing.

The rest of us dug right in. Holly particularly enjoyed her cake, although she still insists on having everything cut into bite-sized pieces for her. I may have to visit her middle school daily to prepare her lunch for her.

After several minutes of skirting around the issue, Josie finally dug in. Once. Then she made a game out of handing me miniscule pieces of cake and frosting.

Opening presents is serious business! She got right to work and Holly was happy to help. We had a wonderful evening, thanks to our party guests. We are all enthralled by Josie. We love her so much and are so happy she's a part of our family!