Avery's First Birthday

(Warning, picture overload)

As I have mentioned before, I have been looking forward to Avery's first birthday for quite awhile. I can't believe she is one. Here are some pictures from her special day.

First, the decor.

I made this picture banner and hung it in the kitchen. I digi scrapped 5 x7 mini pages of Avery's first year. I spray painted clothespins pink to match and hung them on ribbon. I also embellished each clothes pin.

I can't believe how much she has grown.

This is just one of the pages I did for the banner. I will probably make all of the pages into a mini scrapbook.

I got this tissue puff ball tutorial from Martha Stewart. What

a pain! I kept ripping the tissue paper. It was my idea to add

the ribbon. Then I made Bakerella's cupcake pops for a party

favor/thank you. The picture on the basket is the one of her

holding up 1 finger.

I have been wanting to make a birthday banner for awhile. I just digi scrapped each letter and glued it to white card stock, and cut the edges with scalloped scissors. Most of my decor was made using Dani Mogsteads Sweet Cupcake from SSD.

Since the theme was cupcakes, I had to serve cupcakes :) But I wanted to do something a little different then the usual. I made Banana with cream cheese frosting, peanut butter with chocolate frosting and Chocolate with White chocolate raspberry frosting. I get these ideas in my head of things that I want to do, forgetting that I am not a good baker/dessert maker. I spent all day Saturday baking. But it was worth it.

Here is the Birthday Girls cake. I used the wilton cake mold. The cake is completely dairy and egg free.

Here is part of the birthday ensemble. I made the party hat. I just measured Avery's head, decided on the size that I wanted and cut triangles of fabric. After sewing them together, I ironed on interfacing for some strength and sew on the trip. I topped the hat with Cork screw and straight ribbon and a glitter pink A for Avery. I did the cupcake applique shirt for her to wear with her party skirt. The other is an old onsie that I applied the number 1 on front and added some ruffles on the bum. (I love bum ruffles!) That was for her to wear while she eats her cake.

Now for some fun pictures.

Avery givin some lovin to Aunt McCall.

Avery and Daddy
Tired Avery resting on Grandma Waddoup's shoulder

I really though she would dig into the cake more. She always makes a mess of her food. I am forever trying to clean squish food out of her hair. But she only took a couple of bites of cake, most of which we fed to her. But it was still fun, and I think she liked the cake. These cute pictures are courtesy of Aunt Kami. Thanks Kami!
Avery and Mommy.

Thanks to everyone that could make it. We appreciate all of your love and support (and the yummy food brought). We were so happy that you could all spend this special day with us. We missed those of you unable to attend. We love Avery so much! She is such a blessing and and a joy! It was a great day! Avery received many fun gifts that she will thoroughly enjoy. It was a very happy day full of very happy memories. Thanks for reading through all of this. Have a good night.

Chelsea

So Exciting!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Avery had her year appointment with the allergist today. I was anxious because getting her blood drawn was so traumatic (for both of us). She did great though. The Doctor even commented that she wrote "adorable" in her report. (I know I am biased, but I agree) Anyways she had a RAST blood test last Friday and they did the skin test today. She is not allergic to soy (yeah for birthday cake) and she also has no allergies to peanuts or nuts. But we will still avoid them for now to prevent any new allergy development. The best news is that her reactions to dairy and egg whites were minimal. I mean very minimal. Her blood levels where right on the cut off of normal!!!!!! Plus they had just changed the ranges so a couple of months ago she would have been considered negative. This is a huge improvement from 8 months ago. The Doctor is confident that she will outgrow her allergies soon. In fact, they usually don't even consider retesting until age 2, but since she is so close, they are going to retest in 6 months. I am so excited for Avery, she might be enjoying milk and eggs by the end of the summer. YEAH! I feel so blessed. I am so grateful to Our loving Heavenly Father who answers prayers. I just wanted to share our exciting news.

Some Scrappin

Here is the page with Avery on Santa's lap. I can't take any credit for it though, it was a free quick page that my friend Leslie was giving away. Cute huh?

I took some pictures (again) of Avery on saturday in her birthday outfit. They were harder this time because I didn't have any help with entertaining her. But I thought some of them turned out really cute. Here is her 1 year page that I did. I still have more Christmas to scrapbook, but I was in the mood to do this. Almost everything is from Dani's Sweet cupcake kit at SSD. Have a good night.

Getting ready for Avery's 1st Birthday

I am so excited for Avery's Birthday. I have been working on it for quite awhile. The theme is going to be Cupcakes. I made her party hat that she is wearing and made her shirt. I bought the skirt. I also made her a onsie to wear while eating her cake. I will post some pictures of that later. I have been working on different decorations and treats. Here is her birthday invite.

Sad, all of the pictures that I took for this invitation were lost with my computer crashing. Luckily I had the invite on my flash drive.

Avery's First Christmas

On Christmas Eve we ate breakfast with Aaron's Dad and family. It was Delicious, than following tradition, we all went shopping together. Towards the end of our shopping trip we took Avery to see Santa. Obviously, she didn't like him.

After that we headed down to my parents for a yummy Christmas Dinner and a Movie.

Avery woke up around 7 am on Christmas Morning. Not that she was excited, but that is the time she usually wakes up. So after eating breakfast the rest of the family woke up to open presents. Avery was pretty good. She didn't really care about the gifts. She did like the wrapping paper and bows a little. I took this picture at the end. We piled all of the wrapping paper and sat her right in the middle. I love playing around with the ISO and aperature. After that we had a yummy breakfast (Dad's good eggs) and played all day. Later on Christmas we went to Aaron's Grandmas party. It was a lot of fun. We hope that everyone had a wonderful Christmas.

Merry Christmas

We hope that everyone had a safe and Merry Christmas. Ours was wonderful. We were so excited for Avery's first Christmas. Now we have her 1st birthday to look forward to in 2 weeks. I will post more in a couple of days including some pictures of Christmas and Birthday preparations. My Laptop crashed this week. Luckily I had almost everything backed up on my external hard drive except the pictures that I had just taken. Hopefully they can be recovered. So my laptop is currently being repaired and our desktop is just to slow. We love you all!

Monthly Girls night out

So I have been wanting to do something like this for awhile. I don't know how many of you are like me, but I am great at wanting to get together with friends but poor on the follow through. So I thought it would be fun to start a monthly GNO. This is my idea. It could be the same day every month (except holidays and other circumstances) like the 3rd friday or so. We could each take turns hosting it. Whoever was hosting, it would be at their house and they are incharge of activity planning and deligation etc. When we get together we could do lots of things. A craft, tasters table and recipe exchange(where we all bring our favorite crock-pot, desert, fail proof, etc recipes to taste), service, learn something new, just have fun, scrapbook, etc. (sorry lots of etc but we could do anything, the possiblities are endless). We can communicate via email or even start a blog to post our projects, updates, where the next GNO is or supplies needed. An anyone is invited, the more people the less often you have to host and the more people we can get to know. So it may only start with a few, but if we each want to bring other family and friends, Great! If there are 12 of us, you only have to host once a year. And you really could do anything. If you think you have no time to plan, we could all just bring our scrapbooking stuff and scrapbook or even watch a great chick flick. So what do you think? I thought it would be something fun to start the new year with. Let me know what you think and if you are interested. Have a great day.
Chelsea