I have a one year old!!!

What a difference a year makes. I know I'm late and I honestly wanted to post on Nolan's actual birthday (July 14th) but I got busy and tired. But we did it! We made it a whole year now. And we did a lot of exciting activities over the weekend to celebrate.

First of all we went to Hickory Park, a restaurant in our area famous for their Happy Birthday song and free ice cream on your birthday (plus or minus 3 days). So Friday night for dinner, Brian, Nolan and I packed up to go eat. He was a squirmy little baby and really wanted nothing to do with the restaurant and just wanted to be held/grab everything on the table. But I settled him down by putting him on my shoulders. I think he likes to be a tall baby:

It's totally normal to hold babies like this when you're at a restaurant, yes?

We told our waiter that our little guy was having a birthday. And we made him wear his "one." shirt all weekend. I feel like I could pretty much just say that it's his birthday whenever I want now and just get the free ice cream.

By the way, Nolan got a Brownie Sundae thingie with nuts even though I asked that they don't include them. Le sigh. But he loved the ice cream/brownie combo. Yes, he certainly got a lot of sugar this weekend. I'm sorry I'm not sorry here - it was his birthday and I definitely spoiled the hell out of him.

On Saturday this mama got a 3 hour nap in the morning and then Nolan's Grandma and Grandpa Salton came by with a red rider wagon which proved to be useful as a cooler for the kid friendly drinks. Below are some pictures of the party before anyone arrived. I'm especially proud of the flower centerpieces which may not look like much, but I think they added a little something to our tables and the flowers were from our yard! FREE IS GOOOOOD! Also pictured below is our bubble fogger machine which makes white bubbles that when they pop release a fun white fog.

We had about 30 guests, including little babies, the youngest being 2 weeks old. A side by side comparison was just unbelievable, but unfortunately, no pictures were taken. We did take a single picture of our spread which was ALSO from Hickory Park. And probably the best decision we made for our party.... CATERING YOUR FOOD. I can't even imagine how much more crazy things would have been if we had to prepare food on top of decorations.

We still have leftovers from the food for Nolan's party which I think is just fine for Brian since it IS one of his favorite things after all. And the food does heat up extremely well in the microwave.

Brian posted a blog about the family and friends that came so I'm going to gloss over those points and show more pictures of our little guy and our adventures the rest of the weekend. But you can see what he posted here.

The smash cake part was really exciting for all of us, but Nolan was none too pleased. It stands to reason that this boy who makes a habit out of destroying the house wouldn't mind destroying a cake right? He seemed more interested in the balloons. It actually took some coaxing and maybe putting his hand on the cake while he tried to stand up only for him to realize that he would finally make a mess. Even with that he was more interested in being cleaned off. The best was when he clapped his hands because we were all laughing when he finally made a mess. Not pictured below: the 30ish adults surrounding him hoping that he'd make a mess.

The rest of the party went over great. We cleaned off what little cake he had on him and he enjoyed the company of a bunch of grown ups and we maybe didn't care that he was chewing on our beer bottles because we thought it was hilarious.

Mother Of The Year!

Don't worry, he drinks water too.

It was a HOT day. Poor little guy was just sweaty and so were we. Erick said we should turn on the sprinkler which felt AMAZING. Sorry, no pictures of that.

I did, however, get pictures of my awesome Pinterest idea to do a "drive-in movie" in my front yard with the older cousins that came to Nolan's birthday party. I bought 6 different kinds of "movie theater" candy (the kind in the boxes that you get at the grocery store for like a buck instead of $5 at the theater but they're the exact same thing). And little cardboard popcorn containers so each of the kiddos had a movie theater snack while watching The Lego Movie on the garage. I was a bit worried that the texture of the garage would interfere with the movie but it didn't. I imagine because there were a lot of details on the movie to look at (ie backgrounds, forests, cities whatever) but whenever they showed the clear sky you could really see the grooves of the garage. I recommend this idea for a group of kids for sure! You'll need a device to play the DVD (I used my laptop), a projector, extension cords, and optional is some kind of sound system so that you don't rely on your laptop or the projector to be the only source of sound. Given a second chance, I would back out the projector much further and make it even bigger!

Monday was Nolan's actual birthday. With his grandma Kyhl there and the cousins, we had a pretty spectacular day.

Playing with the parachute in the front yard

Enjoying time with his cousins - it was hard to take a decent picture.

Playing with the balloons in the house.

At around 11, we left to get pizza and take it to the garden to eat as a picnic. Little Nolan didn't enjoy the pizza but he did have some fruit.He got pretty impatient while he was waiting for everyone else to finish.

We explored Reiman Gardens, which is a really cool place to just hang out. I wasn't sure what Nolan would think of the place but it turns out he really liked looking at the different flowers! 

I really like this picture for some reason. I believe he was drooling on me at the time.

Wait up for me, mom!

A just my size... alien?

He tried swatting a butterfly... uh oh! Naughty boy!

Look for the butterfly in front of Nolan's right hand

A group picture of the cousins

We finished up the day going for a walk and playing on the swings and of course taking a bath to get nice and clean.