Lily turns 1!

Our beautiful baby Lily turned 1... and she quickly went from baby to toddler! And it's already been 6 months since then! Ah! Oh wait, I don't want to get ahead of myself. I can't wait until I'm done "catching up" on here. Normal life happened between Barrett returning home at the end of August and Lily's birthday on October 10. We didn't do any interesting sight seeing or special activities, at least that I can remember because we don't have any pictures, ha ha. Just regular day-to-day stuff. Although, I did start watching our friends' little boy, Cohen, 3 days a week. He is only 3 weeks younger than Lily and they love each other and have so much fun playing together and learning from each other. I do have plenty of pictures of them together, which I will post eventually. And this is why I want to catch up on here, so I can share some of the normal daily routine things rather than just the bigger events in our lives.

Anyway, back to Lily's birthday in October. One of the best parts about Lily's birthday was that my parents came to visit and celebrate with us! Then Barrett's family came in the day after my parents left! I will post pictures of this later. On Lily's actual birthday we opened a couple presents before heading to the aquarium. Most of the celebration was the next night. Here's a couple pictures from that day.

My mom bought this book and fish for Lily at the aquarium which she still loves.  

We spent a lot of the rest of the day preparing for Lily's party. I had spent a ridiculous amount of thought and time planning for Lily's party, ha ha. And of course what I came up with was time consuming. So this is what my mom and I spent time doing the night they came in: cutting confetti. Who makes their own confetti? Well, apparently I do. It was hard enough finding clear balloons, but non-crumbled tissue paper confetti was harder to find. I REALLY wanted circles, but that literally would have been insane, so we cut squares instead. Thank you mom!

Then, the next morning my parents helped me blow up and stuff the confetti into balloons. What are parents for right? You're never really done helping your children with mundane tasks :). This is what I get to look forward to with Lily when she's an adult...

 Barrett printed off some big pink letters for us and after cutting those out, taping them to the balloon, and attaching it to string, we were done! The only decoration, but it turned out great!

 Then after Lily and my parents went to sleep, Barrett and I started on the cake. I won't go into detail about the involvement of this, but I am grateful for a husband who can decorate better than I can. Since we call her Lily bug all the time, we thought a ladybug was fitting for her first cake.

Lily's birthday dinner, with her favorite foods at the time. You don't really need to see what we ate, I just thought it was a cute picture of my dad feeding Lily while we are running about like crazy finishing stuff up. Such a great grandpa!

Finally, the party began. Lily walking in to see her presents.

Lily was a little more in to the packaging, but I was really excited she got a Utah State onesie. I felt like a terrible alumnus (I think that's the word) for not buying her one yet, so my sister sent one for her birthday.

 Wearing one of the headbands I made her.

 One of the conditions of Lily's cake was that there was a smaller section that she could eat from. So maybe a little morbid, but Lily got to eat the head!

She didn't really know what to do with it at first, especially when she saw how messy it made her hands. But after we cut off a couple pieces for her to taste, she was a little more willing to touch it.

For those who knew Barrett in high school (I know there are some readers out there) this totally reminds me of his "Zoolander" face.

Feeding Daddy some cake.

A couple days after the birthday celebrations, Barrett remembered the present he had made Lily. He bought a 3-D printer for his lab so he designed and made a fun toy for her to play with. (Notice her name on the front).

With Lily officially turning 1 we were anxious for her to walk on her own, (especially since she had been walking with our hands since August!) but that comes later...