Birthday Princess

Anna was blessed beyond belief last month when all of her immediate family gathered to celebrate her first birthday on a beautiful afternoon.  This little girl loves attention and was literally on *cloud nine* with so many people in one spot and all of those eyes focused on her!  The theme was "You are my Sunshine" because it's a song that she hears it everyday and has the print in her room, and, well, she literally is our sunshine.  I also thought it might be the last party I'd be able to host that didn't include an explosion of pink. 

We kept it simple with cookout food, a delicious cake, edible favors, and accents of sunshines and daisies all around.  We included proof that she'd grown over the past year with her printed monthly pictures as a banner on the mantle; and it was so much fun to look at each month and remember what she'd been up to or getting into for that short amount of time while still growing, growing, growing all year long.

The daisy-shaped iced-cookie favors included a tag that read "Thank you for making my birthday brighter!  Love, Anna" ... but in reality, each of us should have been thanking Anna for making our lives *that* much brighter over the past year.  Here's to many, many, many more years, of loving, laughing, and living well with our little ray of sunshine!   



In between her birthday party and her actual birthday was Mother's Day where I was the one spoiled for the day, but then we celebrated her actual *birth*day, this time in true princess style.  We started with pancakes and strawberries in a tiara, played all morning, found ourselves at Chik-fil-A for lunch where Anna tried her first chicken nugget and loved the fruit cup even more, then the park, and then even more playing.  We ended the day with her favorite meal including (turkey) hot dogs and mac 'n' cheese and forced her to stay wide-awake until her birth timeof 6:53pm while we recounted our fondest recollections of those crazy 19 hours of labor (and, nope, she'll never hear the end of that).  All in all, it was a pretty perfect day for a pretty perfect girl!