Irene's 1st Birthday!

I hope (so that I will not say something unfeeling) I will always remember how hard the first year of a child's life is.  I hope instead I can find some gentle way to encourage mothers to see that it is also a sweet, brisk, and wonder-filled time not to be wished away.  Today is Irene's 1st birthday.

For her birthday we gave her a little plastic pool.  She has heaps of toys and piles of clothes.  The kids wanted to get her gifts, but we decided this year their gift would be enjoying the pool with her. 

We set it up on the porch because it was threatening to storm - although the backlight doesn't make it look like that!

I made a sprinkle covered cake for her birthday - mostly because I thought it would be funny to see her lips covered in sprinkles.  (It was!)  It was not too hard to cover the cake in sprinkles, but it was not "pinterest perfect".  I had a hard time estimating how much sprinkle I would need for the cake and bought 15oz and only used about 4.  I guess that is still a quarter of a pound!  15oz would have been an awful lot wouldn't it!

(the I is from an old set of candles that spell out congratulations - most of the other letters are broken)

Her smash cake:

She liked it :)

We also made lemonade ice cream, which was too sour and I wish we'd made chocolate instead!  Live and learn!

Milestones of note:
*not quite walking, she is a very fast, efficient crawler!  She crawls on hand and feet if she is on concrete (outside), which is funny.
*talking a lot, but not a lot of clarity!  She says dada, dog, hi, and bye-bye.  She will repeat all sorts of words.  None of our other babies repeated things the way she does.  Sometimes she seems to understand what she repeats, other times I think she just does it for fun.  She does not sign - except to occasionally motion all done when she wants out of the high chair (she will repeat "all done" if I say it)
*loves to high five!
*eight teeth
*height and weight will have to wait.  Her check up is next week.