One Year Old!

Lily is officially ONE year old! We had fun celebrating her actual birthday on Monday. They decorated at school with a special banner...

 Each month they do a new bulletin board with the kiddos...we are back up to 8 now!

 Here is the birthday girl, ready for breakfast at school!

 We took her out for sushi to celebrate...

...and had to have one more cupcake just because.

 Lily loves Rody, and can really ride him herself now that Papa got her the rocking part!

Lily's party decorations and gifts are now decorating her room. We have tea parties every night now. We are trying to teach her to cheers!

 Lily is communicating!! She is doing her first sign...milk! We can't decide if we are happy or not that we taught her this one (like when she signs it at 3am, or grumps and signs milk all the way home from work...), but it's fun and exciting to think that words are coming soon! She is definitely more interested in what we are saying, and starting to repeat sounds.

Lily is still loving the stairs, which Jason now refers to as our "main attraction." We had a small PEPS night at our house recently, and the kiddos were up and down the whole night. We are excited because Lily has started working on going DOWN the stairs, and can do about 3 at a time. It's so cute to watch her stick her little toes out and see them reach all around for the floor.

 We have finally finished our monthly photo project! This turned into quite the big project, but it fun to see all the pictures together now! Here are some out-takes of month 12. It's getting more and more difficult to keep her still for these!

Lily says, "I'm going to get mommy's camera!!!"

Lily says, "That's a wrap, folks!"

 Just recently Lily has become a very confident walker. She now prefers walking to crawling, and can also stand up in the middle of the room (with nothing to hold on to). She cruises around and around the house checking out each room, nook, cranny, and cabinet over and over. Another funny thing is that she seems to have a thing for fleece...she pulls out anything she can find that is fleece and carries it around the house (like this swaddle blanket, snowsuit, her purple fleece coat, diaper covers, whatever).

We can't believe it's already been a year. We feel like we can't remember anything past yesterday, so it's a good thing we have about a billion pictures! Thank you to everyone who has helped us get here. We feel like toddler-hood is a whole new adventure that we know nothing about. Here's to Year 2!