Tiny turns 1

I love birthdays.

I may have rushed Christmas a bit, because I was so excited for her birthday.

Maybe I was a bit more excited than usual

 because I was able to keep her alive for a year

or maybe because I just really love cake,

but I had been planning her birthday for months.

We started the day off with breakfast in bed. 

I made pancakes with cream cheese whipped cream and berries.

It was so delicious and it ended up tasting like cake.

(I forgot to take a picture before we stared eating it, but here's one before Madeleine put her hand in it.)

We let Madeleine have four or five bites before stripping her down and putting her on the floor.

We were expecting her to dive right in with her hands,

but she sat there trying to use the fork for a while.

Montessori win!!

Matt plopped her in the bath and we got ready to go to Philadelphia.

Right as we were going to leave the UPS guy showed up at the door with two huge boxes for Madeleine.

We figured we could open them before we left.

We opened the first box and there was a toy doll house. 

Madeleine was so thrilled she climbed on top of the box and wouldn't let us take it out.

She was even able to punch a hole through the plastic!

There aren't any photos of us in Philadelphia, because I forgot my camera card.

It was wonderful though.

We stopped by IKEA really fast for lunch and a birthday present,

before driving home and walking around Princeton's campus.

When we got home, we quickly fed Tiny before eating cake.

We had made castle cakes for her birthday.

We used left over whipped cream from our breakfast to put under the cakes

so that it looked like the castles were sitting on clouds.

Matt had been reading Madeleine this book for the last few months.

It's a wonderful story, so we decided to make cakes inspired by it.

We lit the candle again and after blowing it out, we all dug in.

Madeleine just started by eating all of the towers off the castle.

After cake it was time for presents.

Most of the presents she got on Christmas from us were from the dollar store.

I saved all my favorites for her birthday.

She started getting better at the whole unwrapping thing.

(I got her a crayon roll and a puzzle both off of etsy.)

 But my very favorite was still to come.

We stuck it on the floor.

She knew exactly what to do.
As soon as she had pulled that tissue paper out, she grabbed the bear straight out.

But see this isn't just any bear.

It was made by this local stay at home mom.

She makes bears and quilts from baby clothes.

Madeleine and I went over and dropped off Madeleine's newborn clothes a week or so ago.

We got to pick it up on Monday.

It's so beautiful, and I loved seeing Madeleine's newborn clothes being used.
They are full of so many memories that happened a year ago.

I might do a whole blog post on it by itself.
I love it that much, and thankfully Madeleine does too.

She has been carrying it around nonstop.

Matt then finished reading Castle in the Air and put her to bed, before putting together her last gift.

We actually woke Madeleine up when he was done putting it together.

We were pretty excited. :)

Happy Birthday Madeleine.

We love you!

Painting and Day 2

I just finished reading this awesome book last weekend.

I completely loved it.

It was a great life/parenting book.

Her tone was not condescending, 

and I really enjoyed all the little exercises she did throughout the book.

One of the challenges was basically

listing 5 creative activities you would like to do with your child and what is hindering you from doing it.

(She had a nice motivational quote and bigger purpose and stuff too...just that's what I remember. Haha)

Anyway, I had written down finger painting.

I thought it would be so much fun.

I found some finger paint at one of Boston's Targets on Black Friday.

(I couldn't find any here in Princeton, so needless to say, I was thrilled.)

While Madeleine was sleeping I set everything up.

I was so excited.

The only thing was...she wasn't.

:)

The bottles of paint were interesting, along with the little shiny thing that I had to peel off to get the paint off,

but the actual paint, nope.

She poked it, wrinkled her nose, and started chewing on the bottle of paint.

I was not going to give up that easily.

I coated both her hands in paint.

She looked at them and wiped them on her pants.

Finally, I was able to convince her that paper made a cool sound.

So I put paint on her hands while she sat there crinkling it.

I took that as a win. :)

The clean up?

Oh man, paint was EVERYwhere.

I thought Matt was going to kill me.

I put her in the bathroom, but she touched everything on the way there...and everything in the bathroom.

I looked at my now green toilet and wiped it down.

The thing was where I wiped looked cleaner than the rest of the toilet.

It quickly led to the whole bathroom getting cleaned.

And every other surface and room that this little body touched.

But look at the art she made.

So cute right?

It's actually not her first painting.

This one was.

I think the whole thing was pretty successful.

Hopefully next time she gets more into the whole paint thing.

As for the photo of the day...

that was a bit of an ordeal.

The theme for today was "Traditions".

Matt and I don't have any traditions yet.

Last year the only thing we did on Christmas was eat at Outback.

That's not really anything I want to repeat this year.

We didn't even put up a tree.

Celebrating Hanukkah isn't usually one of our traditions,

 but the Hawkers gave us a menorah when we saw them at Thanksgiving.

And things don't get much more traditional than Jewish traditions.

The one tradition that we did have was eating this ice cream.

I was all ready to go and get it, but when we called Coldstone, they informed us they stopped making it.

(After 10 years!!!!!! Tradition destroyers...)

That led me to writing angry emails to Coldstone all afternoon, 

before eating my emotions with my family's traditional chicken enchiladas.

They are good.

Oh well, this year my goal was to start setting traditions for each holiday.

I'm hoping next year we'll have some actual traditions to share.

TRADITIONS!!! (for conference)

This year my goal was to start traditions. With tiny offspring now in existence, I figured we needed to actually start getting our traditions started. We tackled Valentine's Day and Easter, and this week we started a few conference traditions.

We started the weekend with Matt's mission reunion. Matt had been avoiding going since we got married, but since it was at his mission president's home, we decided to go.

After that, we dropped Baby off at my parents' home, so Matt and I could go on a date. We grabbed some food and talked about all the events coming up in our lives. On the drive home, we discussed what questions we wanted to ask God. According to our prophet, if you have questions in your heart, they will be answered during conference. It has worked so far for us, so I told Matt mine and he told me his, so we could help listen for possible answers for each other. 

Then we got home we googled "conference traditions". Matt and I needed some. While we are really good about having conference on for all 4 sessions, I think we have slept through at least half of conference since we've been dating.

So we picked out an easy but awesome breakfast.

eggs cooked in ham in a cupcake pan. 

so easy, but really yummy (even when the ham burns a little, apparently was Matt's favorite part)

We also had snack jars. Every time one of the words on the jar were said we got to eat on of whatever is in the jar. Matt's favorite was "sin/temptation" which are flaming hot cheetos. I thought it was even more appropriate since it makes our fingers "like scarlet". 

It worked like a gem. Matt and I stayed awake and alert the whole time. 

A small miracle after how much sleep I got last night.

(and we are totally going to have to pick less frequent words when our kid can eat solid foods)

And now in between conference sessions, we finally took our naps (as you can tell, tiny creature isn't so good at this tradition yet.) 

Do you have any conference tricks of staying awake? How about traditions?