Our little sunshine Clementine turned one

The day before Clementine's birthday we were thinking about what we were doing prior to her birth and telling her along the way about her birth story.  I also made observations about what the garden was doing - the citrus trees were blooming filling the yard with the smell of orange and Meyer lemon blossoms, robins were migrating through singing their lovely songs (in addition to nesting mocking birds, brown thrashers, downy and red-bellied woodpeckers, and cardinals), the mulberry tree was leafing out and starting to bloom, and the garden was bursting with kale. It was a fun way to do it, but also a little surreal - my, how different life looks from one year to the next!

This year her birthday fell on a Friday so Wade had to work.  I got up with C and we had a nice breakfast then opened her card and present from her Grandpa John and Grandmama Susie (fun sand toys for the beach!).  After strutting around on her walker wagon we settled in for a nap and snuggle.  Once she got up, Granzie and Poppi arrived for lunch and to hang out for the day.  We had lunch, opened presents from them, then played before she settled in for another afternoon nap.  When she got up, Wade had come home early from work so we could open the rest of her presents from us and from Wade's family.  We had a lot of fun watching her and when she was done we did her fun activity for the day (it was rainy and yuck that day so we couldn't do anything fun outside) - we let her finger paint and use crayons for the first time.  It was pretty funny - we stripped her down to a diaper and just let her go at it with baby-safe food-based paints and crayons.  We got lots of good video and pictures.  After that we had dinner and sang to her while she ate her birthday "cake" (homemade peach blueberry cobbler). She went down for bed after a peaceful bath with Dada and Granzie, and we all followed not long after since we had a party to prep for early in the morning.

Birthday girl ready for her presents!

Dada painted a heart on the birthday girl's chest. :)

For her first birthday party we wanted to keep it pretty small and low key so she wouldn't feel too overwhelmed by it all.  It was a team effort as Dada and Poppi prepped the yard while Granzie and I prepped the food.  Poppi was on baby play duty in the morning and let the birthday girl get into all sorts of mischief in the yard - she came back in covered in dirt and the biggest smile I've ever seen.  Thankfully it tired her out and she took a wonderfully long nap right before her party and got up refreshed just in time for it to start.  We went with a "You are My Sunshine" theme since that's been one of her favorite songs to go to sleep to and the song I used to sing to her during my prenatal yoga classes (my teacher suggested it as a way to connect with her before she was born and she changed the words to the song so the last verse goes "We're so happy you came our way" instead of "Please don't take my sunshine away").  The party was a lot of fun, but a bit harried since I spent the morning baking her banana spice buckwheat cupcakes (with Dada's honey cream cheese icing) and double chocolate teff brownies from scratch (these and the cobbler recipe are from one of my favorite food blogs, Nourishing Meals.com).  We also made quiche for lunch for everyone and everything we served was something Clementine could (and did) eat.  She grazed on hummus, fruit, cheese, veggie quiche, and eventually stuffed her face with a cupcake after the requisite singing.  Entertainment for the party included a bubble machine and bubble wands (one of her early words: "buhbuhl"), picking mulberries (another one of her favorites), and splashing in a bucket of water for her ("wa").  We also had pinwheels for the kids, leis for everybody, and everyone took multiple trips over to visit the chickens. :)

Enjoying her first icing covered muffin (she eats them plain for breakfast)

The birthday girl in her birthday onesie and tutu.

It wasn't until after we were cleaning everything up that I realized I didn't take any pictures of decorations so I tried to capture a few things while C took her afternoon nap.  We got the themed decorations from a great Etsy store and I hope we can use them again sometime they're so cute I don't want to put them away!  Granzie found and adorable polka dot name banner and hat on this Etsy store, which we'll also have to reuse every year - in fact I'm going leave up the name banner in her room all year!

Her felt party hat - she didn't like wearing it but loved the puff ball on top!

For more pictures and video from her birthday, go here.

11 months

We officially live with a little hurricane now... she leaves destruction in her wake, is constantly in motion, splashes water everywhere at any chance, and makes quite the dramatic display when she doesn't get her way.  It's hard to believe she'll soon be a year old.  She's trying to climb all over everything (she is constantly hitching her leg up to see if she can get up on something), loves to clap, give kisses, wave good-bye (never on cue of course), push her walker-wagon around the house, and unpacking anything we give her access to (dishwasher, baking drawer, washer, diaper bins, laundry baskets, etc).  She also is entering into the developmental phase where she will throw a cry fest if she doesn't get her way and her ability to muster so much drama for someone so little is at this point, hilarious.  (Except on the days when that's all she does, then it's exhausting)  Otherwise we finally feel like we're having fun with parenting rather than just  having endless days of feeding and changing diapers.  

Now it feels a little more real - she watches everything we do and sometimes tries to imitate us, which is reminding me to examine how I do things to see what she's learning.  For instance - she learned to give kisses by watching me kiss the cats, which was pretty funny, and tells me that she'll learn to love animals because I do too (she'll definitely be a cat lover - just the sight of them makes her giggle).  So I'm finding myself evaluating what I want her to learn and remember of me when she's grown and how I want to teach her about what's important in life - how to actually show her rather than tell her.  It's one thing to teach your ideals to someone, it's another to actually live and model them.  Every morning I silently remind myself to have the patience, the strength, and the wisdom to do things the right way the first time so that Clementine learns right from wrong, but that she also learns that even if doing the right thing take more time and energy, it's still worth doing it that way.  She's clearly eager to talk and babbles at us fairly constantly now, so I'm eager to be able to hear her take on the world and see what questions bubble up in her little busy mind.

I started her 11 month photo file - there's a video snippet in there of her giving Amelie a kiss...  hilarious and gross.