A weekend full of celebrating!

We spent the weekend celebrating Perry's first birthday. On his birthday, we celebrated by going to the zoo and later going out to eat. It was a fun day and we managed to escape the rain while we were at the zoo. Here are a few pics I took of him that morning.

"That's right I'm 1!!!"

Excited about all of his presents

Playing the new guitar

His first taste of cake!

He finally decided to dive right in after hesitating for awhile

We had a family birthday party for Perry and Elise on Sunday. It was a lot of fun celebrating their 1st and 2nd birthdays together.

The cute birthday boy and girl

The Crew

I think that Perry had a great first birthday!! We had a wonderful time celebrating all weekend. And on his birthday, he first tooth finally started poking though! He was busy all day today playing with his new toys. He is also getting much closer to walking. He will stand and balance by himself for quite awhile and he wants to walk holding hands all day long. He really only uses my fingers for balance and walks on his own. So I don't think that walking will be as far off as I originally thought.

Perry's First Year

Today we are celebrating Perry's first birthday. It is bittersweet for me. With Kaden and Emerson, I was happy on their first birthday. I was excited for them to grow up and see what the next year brought. Today I am happy that Perry is one and everyday he shows more and more of his personality but I am sad that my last baby is not a baby anymore! He had a great first year and I enjoyed every moment of it (even the colic stage). He is now a very laid back little man who almost always has a smile on his face.

Happy 1st Birthday Perry! I love you very much!

Easter Bunny Pictures

A couple of weeks ago the kids had their pictures taken with some bunnies. It went way better than I expected, especially since Perry is scared of just about every animal. Here are the results!

Happy Easter!!

We had a great Easter and Easter weekend. Chris had Friday off so we able to go bowling with the whole family. Saturday we went to an Easter egg hunt at the mall and a failed attempt to take pictures with the Easter bunny. On Easter after church we went over to my grandparents where my ENTIRE family (all 35 of us) gathered for an egg hunt and dinner.

Emmy was a big fan of peeps! She ate her entire box that the easter bunny put in her basket.

Trying to get a picture of all of the kids after the egg hunt. It is easier said than done!

Easter Treats!

During Spring Break this week, we have had all sorts of Easter fun. We've done different art projects, went on an egg hunt, took pictures with real bunnies, and baked some yummy Easter goodies. We had originally planned a play date with my friend Kristen and her kids but Emmy had some sort of stomach bug that morning so we had to cancel and bake all by ourselves. I had seen this idea here and was excited to try it with the kids. It is so easy to do. I even cheated and used a Betty Crocker sugar cookie mix. After you mix up the cookie dough, you just dye the dough with the gel dyes. If you try make these cookies the only tip I have would be to divide your cookie dough and put into Ziploc bags and add the color gel. That way you can seal the bag and mix the dough without dying your hands. I learned this the hard way, my hands are still purple. You could also use rubber gloves if you have them but I didn't have any. I thought it was cute that when I told Emmy that we were going to do this, she said, "But mom I don't want to dye!". I then had to explain to her that die and dye meant two different things.

This is what some of our cookies turned out like.

Kaden had such a great time playing with the cookie dough and making cookies. He was very creative coming up with lots of his own ideas. He decided that we didn't have enough cookie cutters (I have a whole cabinet full) so he was making shapes w/o the cookie cutters. Here he is working on a tree. It was a little too difficult for Emmy to roll out the cookies and use the cookie cutters but she still had fun playing with the cookie dough like it was playdough.

Here are the cookies that the kids plan on leaving for the Easter bunny, if we still have any left on Saturday night.

I had also made these little baskets for the egg hunt with my moms group. They turned out to be way more difficult then I thought they would be. You basically make the rice crispy treat recipe (I used fruit pebbles to be more colorful) and you shape them into baskets in muffin cups or mini muffin cups. You put the twizzler in the rice crispy treat and then place jelly beans in the basket. You could also dye coconut green for grass and add it under the jelly beans. I haven't met very many kids that like coconut though so I just skipped that step. I made the mistake of taking mine out of the muffin cups and covering them and they melted!! I had to redo all of them and I left them sitting out overnight which made them too hard. The only way I would make these again would be if you could make them on the morning that you would be serving them, so that they would stay fresh.

My Cute Bunnies

Yesterday, I tried to get some photos of Perry. Like always Kaden and Emmy wanted in on the photo shoot. After taking pictures, Kaden and Emmy ate their entire carrot. Maybe I should attempt to take bunny pictures more often so that they will eat their veggies!

This one is of Kaden when he was 6 months old.