Snug's Birthday!!

First I want to thank everyone for their kind comments!
It's nice to know I'm not a lone island out here in blogger world- thanks for checking in on us!

Friday was Cole's first birthday!! I can't believe he's one already. He's been such a joy in our lives. He is almost always pretty mellow. While he has his moments, he is usually smiling and babbling sweetly about something. I like to call him "Snug" or "Snuggy" because he is SOOOO gosh darn snuggly. He has this thing where he'll snuggle his head into me or his blanket or teddy bear and then kick his feet out over and over. That's his snuggle trademark.

Some of his accomplishments this year include sitting up, crawling, pulling up and cruising (no walking yet....but that's just fine by me). He does say a couple of words, his most obvious one is "tickle." When we tickle his belly or feet, he'll often repeat over and over "tickle, tickle, tickle." Sometime in the near future I will post a little quirk of his which is to pick up little "people" toys or other small toys (not choking hazard size, though, I promise) and stick them in his mouth and carry them there while he goes about his business of playing. I have several pictures now so stay tuned....

In the above picture, he was having a pre-birthday-dinner snack of dirt and/or possibly some dead bugs found in the track of our sliding glass door. It's a good thing he's durable.....and it looks like I've got something to add to my cleaning list.

Ta-Da! I made a cute little bear cake for him. My main wish was to make something with big eyeballs. He has a favorite book with sesame street characters and they all have big eyes. He LOVES it! And the cake was a hit as well. Good thing, it "only" took me an hour to decorate because I was totally winging it!! (don't laugh, Kathy!)

"happy birthday to you...."

Oh yeah, lay the icing on thick and you're sure to get a nice messy face. After two kids who failed to sufficiently mess their faces, I finally learned the trick: dark frosting and lots of it!

He really had at it and then started crying. He LOVED eating the cake, but didn't like being messy. lol.

The aftermath. Okay, so I was a little obsessed about the cake this time.

I love this picture of Ethan. He was riding bikes outside and thought his helmet really was on correctly. Since he's only on a push along bike right now, I didn't go fix it. I'd rather just stand there and laugh at him.

Cole bear got several cute gifts. I let the other kids help open them, and Ethan couldn't wait to play with his brother's stuff. For the birthday we had a pizza party. Part of Wendell's family was able to make it. I made a homemade BBQ chicken pizza, his mom brought a chicago stuffed pizza from Papa Murpheys and Michele brought a pepperoni one. Then we had cupcakes and ice cream. Thanks for coming!

This is a picture of my new niece, Ava (I'm pretty sure that's how they're spelling it). Tracy gave birth and then a week or so later, they were off to California to spend several weeks with Tracy's parents! So we haven't really had much time to bond with this little cutie. She's still tiny and cute - so it's all good.