Bee's first birthday

Bee's 4th (oh my goodness) birthday is today and since I can't share today's events (since we are still traveling), I wanted to share something else. I went back and looked at scrapbooks today and enjoyed seeing the pages from her first birthday party. I somewhere heard the quote, "The days are long, but the years are short." I don't know who said it, but it certainly applies here. Here are some pictures right from my scrapbook of Bee's first birthday, glare and all.

When Bee turned one, I was job share teaching and with a summer birthday, I was out of school. I apparently had way to much spare time on my hands! We had a picnic lunch. I think we invited about 45 people. The house we lived in at the time was plenty big and had a long farmers porch on the back that my hubby (and his dad and brother) built. I hung 52 paper folded stars on the rafters (for her 52 weeks) and had a bunch of these paper lady bugs and bees that I spent forever cutting and gluing together hanging as garland on fishing line. I do remember that it was a bit windy and they flew around and got tangled. Here are the invitations: (That's a real candle attached)

I invited each guest to write a short note to Bee about what they wished for her. I made a little booklet with a bunch of pages and I just left it out on a table. The notes were very sweet. I just remembered that I was thinking this would be a fun tradition to start at each birthday, I guess I forgot. My dad ended up turning his wish for Bee into a sermon, it's in there too.

Here are my scrapbook pages from the party. Bee was not eating a lot of solid food at one year (why eat when you can nurse!) so she did not even have a 'smash' cake. She ate a bite of a apple cake we call apple kuchen. I made all of the little ones at the party their own cake baked in individual foil star pans. We had a bunch of kids on different diets, so they also had a tag listing the ingredients. again, way too much time on my hands. I made a watermelon looking cake for the adults to enjoy. The lady bug thing in the middle are these yummy crackers with a garlic cream cheese and sour cream layer topped with a cut cherry tomato and slice of an olive. Black food gel makes the dots.

Here are thank yous. I made them on the computer and printed them out at the drugstore. They have a picture from each month.

Something I always do on the kids birthdays is fill out two sheets to go in the scrapbook. One reads, "10 great things about _____." I list 10 of my favorite things, some funny, some more mushy. The second one reads, "______ at 1." It has all of the important stats (I've tweaked this as they have grown) height, weight, number of teeth, favorite toys, best friends, favorite foods, favorite music, likes, dislikes, etc. The kids love to go back and hear what their favorite things were.

We had a big party for Lou's first birthday too. but poor Bee got jipped for her 2nd birthday. Baby Lou was 1 1/2 months old, we had only lived in the state for 3 months, barely knew anyone, didn't have family for 1000 miles and so we didn't have a party. She did get a tigger cake because my dad and step mom happened to be in town seeing the new baby. We had a few balloons and I don't think she noticed the difference.