Let her eat cake!

How fitting that I started this blog just before Lauren was born and now my 100th post is about her first bithday party! Warning...this is a LONG post!

We had a nice gathering with our family and close friends on Sunday, March 15th to celebrate Lauren's first birthday. Her real birthday was on February 24th, but decided to postpone the party a bit until the weather could be more cooperative. Today was a beautiful day with lots of sunshine! I chose a fairly simple menu of italian beef sandwiches, baked beans, pasta salad, chips, cake, & ice cream. The food all came together wonderfully and the morning went smoothly. My parents got here a little before everyone else and got some play time with Hayden and Lauren.

Here is our birthday girl hanging out before her big day.

Check out all these gifts!

Once everyone arrived, we ate and moved on to the cake. Lauren had her own 'smash cake.' She was not very happy to get into her high chair and let us know it. Once we started to sing "Happy Birthday" to her, she cheered up and enjoyed herself.
Here is Lauren checking us all out as we sang to her...

Let the cake eating begin...

She started off sort of tentatively...

Then she figured out that this stuff really tastes good and started in with bigger handfuls...

Daddy put her hat on her head and then took it off. This is her feeling to see if it is still there. No hat, but lots of frosting now.

This is great! I ate up at least half of the cake!

What a happy family to have our little girl in the world for a whole year already! She's been such a great addition!

Lauren was checking out her first card and seemed to think the giraffe was neat. "See the giraffe Nana?"

So many helpers! Lauren received many great gifts...lots of great outfits (one even homemade!), three stages of riding toys, stuffed animals, a jacket, and many others!

One more note about the weekend... I wrote a while ago about a 5K that I had signed up for. Well, it was on Saturday and I actually went through with it. Thanks to the support of Jen and her friend Sarah, I was able to run about 1/3 of it and walked the rest. I ran/walked the first mile in 10 min. 20 seconds. My total time was a pathetic 37 min. 46 sec. However, I finished before 3 other runners in my age group. I was never trying to beat anyone...just to finish...alive.

Thanks for making your way through the whole post. It was a doozie! Have a great week!

7 days and counting until Disney!!!!!!!!!!!!!