A Little Celebration for a Little Girl

Ella's birthday is today!

She is one sweet little year old.

Last night we had a small party with Adam's brothers and Adam's brother's wonderful girlfriend, Heidi.

Next year I think we'll have a full-on party because I think she'll love it.

But at this age I knew she wouldn't really care that much about a party so I decided to keep it small and just do things I knew she would enjoy.

I had been plotting in my imagination for a long time now how I wanted her birthday to go.

One thing I imagined was that her cake would look like this pin I found on Pinterest:

Beautiful, right?

I made some white cake from scratch and some raspberry frosting because that girl loves her raspberries.

Unfortunately, when you add lots of raspberry sauce to buttercream frosting it gets really heavy and sloppy and doesn't really frost a cake too well.

It looks something like this:

Yeah.

Fail.

Big time.

I mean, that thing looks like a pink hair ball explosion.

I don't even know.

I didn't even try to finish frosting the big cake because that frosting was out of control.

Luckily, it tasted better than it looked.

Ella liked it.

And then there were presents to be opened.

The one thing I knew she would like was a 3-in-1 trike, which her Grammy and Pa Jones got for her.

But after that, she really has very little interest in toys and I didn't want to spend money on something she would never play with.

So instead, for her birthday I got her a ton of wonderful children's books that I love.

As you may recall, she doesn't care for books very much right now, but I'm hoping that one day she will and when she does I want our home to be filled with books that have the most wonderful illustrations so that those beautiful pictures can be a part of her everyday life.

I had way too much fun selecting my favorite children's books.

And I can hardly wait for the day when I can read them to Ella!

So although she probably won't play with her birthday presents now, I hope she'll love them one day.

We also blew up some balloons and put them in a box and she loved playing with those because what kid doesn't like balloons?

None.

Then we took a walk with Ella's new trike and she was in heaven!

She loved that thing.

I can't wait for her to figure out that it's a tricycle that she can pedal.

 Here's her uncles Seth and Ethan on our little walk.

And now a video of the day:

It includes her digging her fingers in some cake and me opening her presents for her and all of us playing games at the end of the day while listening to Christmas music.

Today we are finishing off the celebration by going swimming at a place that we hear is really fun.

Happy October 29th!