Amelia Earhart...

We've had a busy weekend! Amelia had a birthday party on Saturday. She wore her new boots. :)



This picture cracks me up. She acts like her legs don't work a lot of the time. I'm sure the knee high boots don't help. (LOL)



Here's Haeden, the birthday boy. He and Amelia were born on the same day, same hospital. We were right across the hall from each other!



It was a great party - we had a fun time!



After the party, we went to Uncle Gerry & Aunt Joy's to walk around their neighborhood to do a little trick-or-treating. Here's our little Amelia Earhart. :)



She racked up on candy. She kept one sucker and gave the rest to her cousins. :)



Amelia getting some love from fam.



Our neighborhood had trick-or-treating on Sunday night. Amelia and I stayed home and handed out candy to all of the kiddos. We had LOTS of them. Amelia enjoyed a sucker. She finished the entire thing!



Come eight o'clock, it was Amelia's bedtime. I decided to put a sign on the porch and let the kiddos help themselves. I put a limit on how many for them to choose - mainly because I could see a group of teenagers coming through and emptying the entire bowl into their bags. HA! We totally ran out of candy last year!



It has been a wonderful weekend with my baby girl. She is such a handful, but brings me joy like no one else. I hope you had a fun weekend and ate lots of candy. :)

Love to all,

A little peek at the party...

I promised photos of the party and though it's not near all of them, Karin was sweet enough to send me a sneak peek! I'm sure there will be several posts for this party...otherwise, it will be way too long of a post.

My S-I-L, Jen made this cute sign for the front door!



Welcome to the party!



Daddy & Mommy with the birthday girl!



Amelia wore these cute bloomers. She had two party dresses...one for eating/smashing her cake and the other for the party.



Here's part of the food table. I will have to share the recipe for the apple cider punch...it was my favorite. I will be making it for Thanksgiving & Christmas!



Amelia's "smash cake." The girl was not timid when it came to eating this thing!



I wanted to have plenty for the kiddos to do, so their parents could hang out and relax under the tent. We had a bounce castle...



Balloon animals...



And face painting!



Here's one of Amelia opening her gifts. She looks so big in this pic!



And as favors, we had cotton candy for everyone to take home. The label read, "Thanks for making my birthday so sweet - Love, Amelia"



More to come!!

Love to all,
Jill

Amelia's 1st Birthday...

My baby is one year old. Seriously, it was the fastest year of my life...and the best year of my life.

She woke up on her actual birthday and was feeling so much better. She had strep the week leading up to her birthday. This made for a crazy week. I assumed that I would have the entire week to focus on finalizing things for her party, but it ended up being a week of taking care of a very sick baby girl. Alex was sick too. She shared her strep with him. Bless his heart. Bless all of our hearts. It was a hard week!

My Mom & Dad came in a couple of days before the party to help out. This is Amelia the morning of her actual birthday. We were all singing Happy Birthday to her. She thought it was funny.



She received a couple of packages in the mail for her birthday. My sweet friend, Faith made her this adorable shirt! I just love it on her. Thank you, Faith!!



My blogging friend, Mel sent her a package with a play camera, two cute shirts, and these adorable tennis shoes! She was playing with the camera immediately. Thank you, Mel!!



I've been thinking about Amelia's first birthday, since before Amelia was conceived. (LOL) I love to throw a party. I've saved hundreds of pictures and had so many ideas. It was hard to narrow down what I wanted to do. I just knew that I wanted it to be colorful and to be a huge celebration of her life!

I found a picture on this party site a while back. This became my inspiration for her party.



This is the invite that my friend, Cyndie designed! I love how it turned out.




I remember reading on Kim's blog that she never regrets hiring a photographer for her children's birthday parties. I decided to do just that. Now that it's over, I don't know how I would have taken pictures of everything/everyone and been able to just enjoy Amelia. I'm waiting on pictures, but as soon as I receive them - I'll be sharing every bit of the party with you guys!! It was such a special day.

So more of Amelia's 1st birthday party to come!

Love to all,

Amelia's First Year Video

Photo and video editing at www.OneTrueMedia.com

All About Amelia - 12 months old!

Amelia, you're 1 year old!!



You weigh 24 pounds. We're not sure how tall you are...we'll find out at your next well-visit.

You're wearing size 3 diapers.

You're wearing 12-18 month clothing and size 4 shoe. Every time we've arrived somewhere, you've removed your shoes and socks in the backseat. We've started waiting to put them on you when we arrive at our destination. :)

You usually sleep 12 hours every night and take 2 naps during the day.

Though this week, that hasn't been the case. You haven't slept well at all. You had your first visit to Children's after-hours clinic over the weekend.



After two trips to the doctor and Mommy asking for the test...we finally found out that you have strep throat. You've cried so much, had fever, a bad cough, and even lost your voice. It just breaks our hearts to see you in pain and so sick.



Thankfully, the meds have kicked in and you started taking naps and sleeping in your crib again last night. We're so happy that you're feeling better on your birthday!

You take 8-10 ounces of formula and have baby food at breakfast, lunch and dinner. You have become less interested in baby food though. We've started feeding you off our plate and you really like that. Every time we start eating something, you look at us and say "NUM-NUM." We gave you some soft cheese yesterday and you were a fan. We'll be switching to whole milk this month, so we'll see if you love it or hate it. We can't believe it's already time to take you off formula.

You love to wave. It's your favorite thing to do when someone enters or leaves a room.

You have 6 teeth (four on top - two on bottom). We think your molars are trying to come in...you're constantly sticking stuff back there to chew on.

You LOVE bath time. If we accidentally say it, you immediately start saying "DAT" over and over and over. So that's evidently your word for bath! :)

You've started speaking your own little language and it's hilarious. We say you sound like a little Ewok. We love to hear you talk. You can now say "juice." We've started working with you on saying names of family members - sometimes it sounds like your repeating exactly what we're saying! Though it's not consistent yet.

You stand up and walk behind some of your toys. You will stand on your own, but haven't tried to take a step without holding onto something.

Your favorite movie is Elf. We don't watch a lot of tv, but we put this on when we're in the kitchen and you love it. You even laugh at certain parts of the movie. We've tried Veggie Tales and other DVD's, but none keep your attention like Will Ferrell in an Elf costume. (LOL)



We can't believe you're a year old. Your Mommy can't talk about it without crying! You're our beautiful baby girl and we're beyond grateful that God chose us to be your parents. This has been the happiest year of our lives and it's all because of YOU!!



Now let's eat some cake!! :)

Happy 1st Birthday, sweet girl!

We love you,
Daddy & Mommy

Our little pumpkin...

I've been wanting to take Amelia to the pumpkin patch and decided yesterday was the day, since the next few weekends are going to be busy. I wish it had been a little cooler, but she did really well despite the heat. There were so many kiddos running around, it was hard to keep her attention to take her picture. She's a people-watcher and will sit and wave at everyone going by, whether they're paying her any attention or not.



Me and my little pumpkin.



They had lots for the kids to do, but Amelia was a too small for most of it. She had no clue why we were sticking her head through this hole.



The line and wait to go out to the actual pumpkin patch was so long. We didn't want to keep Amelia directly in the heat, so we stuck around the covered area where they were selling the pumpkins. Maybe next year it will be nice and cool and we will take a hayride out to the pumpkin patch.



We picked up a couple of large pumpkins for the front porch and a Cinderella pumpkin (those are my fave) to use inside. We let Amelia choose her own tiny pumpkin. :)



We finished off the day with a cold lemonade, which Amelia loved. She would say, "YUM...YUM" until we gave her another drink. They also had those ginormous corn dogs like you get at the fair, but I refrained. We may have to take another trip out there just for the funnel cakes and corn dogs. ;)



It was a fun day - just the three of us!

Love to all,

A long week...

I'm so behind on blogging. I haven't had a chance to read many of your blogs either. Maybe I will catch up after Amelia's birthday party. Alex was out of town on business last week, so it was just me and Amelia. My sister and I had a huge, two-day catering job, so we were busy prepping. We did a dessert bar one night and baked over 400 cupcakes. My favorite was the chocolate peanut butter...they were so good.



Mid-week I started noticing Diesel acting differently. He just didn't have a lot of energy. On Thursday, I was struggling to get him to eat anything (very unusual). By Friday, he stopped eating all together. Alex got back into town late Friday night and I had made a vet appointment for Dies for early Saturday morning. We didn't know what was wrong, but weren't prepared to hear that he had acute kidney failure. We were so upset. The hardest part was not knowing what caused it. I have cried more in the last week than in quite some time. Diesel stayed at the vet and they began different treatments, in hopes to get his kidneys to start functioning properly. On Thursday morning we got the news that Diesel had passed away during the night. I'm crying just typing this. It's hard to believe he's gone. Diesel was our furbaby. He was our baby before we had Amelia. Alex bought Diesel as a puppy when we were separated. He was Alex's best friend through those hard months. He took him fishing, to work, to the park...everywhere.



I'd never really had a pet until Diesel. I never knew your heart could hurt this bad over losing an animal. He was part of our family. He was such a sweet dog. He was very smart...Alex had taught him all sorts of tricks. He was obedient and loved everyone. He would let our nephews and nieces boss him around and lay all over him. Over the last month Amelia had started crawling over to the glass door, standing up, and then beating on it for him to come see her. When we would take family walks, he would want his nose right in her stroller and she would constantly be reaching to pet him. I always felt safe with Alex out of town because we had Diesel. He was very gentle, but was quick to protect if he thought something was wrong. It will take quite some time to get used to him being gone.



We will miss him very much.



We wanted to get out of the house today, so we took Amelia to the pumpkin patch. We had a great time and took lots of pictures. I will post those tomorrow.

Love to all,