Elle's 1st Birthday!

I cannot even believe that Elle turned 1 today! Didn't I just bring her home from the hospital yesterday? Didn't Ashley just get married and I pretended that my water broke at her wedding last week? WOW, I think my philosophy is that when you are pregnant, life goes SO SLOW! When you have your baby here, life goes way too fast!

Elle is the best little baby ever! So easy going and happy! She even tolerates her sister picking her up and cuddling her a little too hard! We are so blessed to have her in our family and we love her SO much! I still kiss her at least 300 times a day-just can't help myself because those cheeks are irrisitable!

Happy Birthday Baby ELLE!
{By the way, we call her ELLIE, but I am hoping that by spelling it ELLE, the E will not be silent at the end and will act as a long vowel!}

Party Time

We had a Family Party for Elle's Birthday and it was FUN! Thanks to everyone who came! We had finger foods in honor of Elle since that is mostly what she eats nowadays!

Elle's Park Lunch

I thought and though about what we should do for Elle's birthday, and finally I thought, Elle LOVES to swing, so we took her to the park with a picnic. After we ate, we swung her forever, and when I thought she had enough, I got her out and she got so mad because she wanted to keep on going! I love Riley and Elle's hair once they went down the slide--Static!

When we came home, Elle was SO SLEEPY and fell asleep on the chair! The Birthday Girls can do whatever she wants on her birthday-she is QUEEN for a day!

THE COOLEST Birthday Cake EVER!

So I felt like I needed to redeem myself after creating a barbie cake disaster for Sunny's birthday in May! I put the whole barbie body in the cake instead of half of the body--it totally cracked in half!

So, this year, I was inspired to make a fondant cake after watching the Food Network's Cake Challenge Show! They make the most amazing cakes and the judges would have ripped apart my cake for sure-but that's okay, I still think it is cool!

I made a homemade Vanilla and Chocolate cake that was super soft and moist, iced it, then put white fondant on top of it and decorated it with a bunch of colorful dots! Riley & Sunny had a ton of fun helping me with the dots, kind of like play dough!
Regan came home from work while we were making it and wanted to help, so I put him in charge of the letters and the little girl! I think he did a great job creating a girl with fondant!

I even made Elle her very own little cake to dig into, but for some reason none of my kids ever want to do that! Elle just lightly put her finger in the frosting and licked her finger-no diving in for this dainty girl!

After this experience, I would love to take a cake decorating class and get better at it because it is fun to make a Cool birthday Cake! Riley is already planning what he wants his birthday cake to look like, and his birthday isn't until March!