Juliana's Birthday Party

One year old

One year ago today we met sweet Miss. Juliana Jayne for the first time. She was born at 1:58pm after an amazingly easy 4.5 hour labor. She weighed 7lbs 1oz and was 20" long.

Jonathan and I, with a seven minutes old Juliana...

Half an hour old and not thrilled about the poking, prodding and the new ankle bracelet. This expression should be familiar if you read the last blog post...

Four hours old and meeting Gabriella for the first time...

Seven hours old, exhausted and wishing that Mom would stop with the pictures already.

And today, one year old and finally getting a bite of chocolate cake...

Finally, a Birthday Party

Gabriella's patience was certainly tested with the two week delay of her birthday party. We finally had her party this morning and it went quite well. Two of the five little girls weren't able to make it, but we still had a lot of fun.

Here is the fabulous invitation Jonathan made. Our address and the date etc.... have been removed from this copy. This is one of my favorite pictures of Gabriella and I thought the invites turned out super cute. Jonathan made the tiara graphic from scratch on photoshop. Seriously. He didn't use any starting image and we don't even have a wacom tablet. He just "drew" it with a mouse (using lots of copying/pasting and making mirror images.) You can click this picture to see a bigger version.

Each girl got to decorate her own wand and tiara. I made the wands and bought the tiaras at Joann's Fabrics. -Note Gabriella zooming through the background.

Gabriella had a very methodical approach to tiara decorating... one big gem on each point and eventually she added a big foam star in the middle.

The fruit salad was pretty popular and of course Jonathan had to show off by doing the whole watermelon bowl thing. We also had pasta salad, chicken and... tiara cupcakes.

Tiara cupcakes with skittles for gems was a great idea... I just forgot that I have no skills with icing.

Gabriella painted special goodie bags for each of her friends. I cut a sponge into a tiara stamp and she had a blast mixing up shades of pink a lavender and stamping. As she made each one she would say things like "Iona will love this purple color" or "Grace would like a Sleeping Beauty sticker." We filled each bag with some non-candy princess items. Grace wasn't able to make the party today so we saved her bag for her. (Good thing we still had her bag, because I forget to take pictures before the others got ripped into!)

I have to say that this was probably the calmest preschoolers birthday party I've ever been to. While the girls were decorating tiaras and wands they were concentrating so hard it was nearly silent. They enjoyed quite a bit of dress up and tea party free play, which was also pretty calm. Lunch was full of please and thank yous. Obviously these kids' parents have done something right!

Thank you to all the friends that came to celebrate today! I may post a few pictures of the cuties later, but I need to ask permission from their parents first. So, last, but not least...

Princess Juliana....

The Queen...

Gabriella's Birthday

I'm a little behind on this one, but I thought I would update on Gabriella's birthday.

We decided that a birthday trip to the zoo would be great fun. I should've known this might not be the best idea when on the way Gabriella asked, "The giraffes are in cages, right? So they can't eat people?" Apparently, my dear child's fear of dogs has extended to most other furry members of the animal kingdom. We saw the bear first and it terrifed her. She didn't want anything to do with the first 10 animals we saw including the bunny at the petting zoo. Eventually she warmed up a bit and enjoyed herself. Evidently, monkeys are not scary. She also enjoyed the zebra, the bats, the penguins and the giraffe (who was indeed in an enclosure and didn't look like he wanted to eat anything but his leaves.)

Gabriella and the not-so vicious giraffe...



Juliana enjoyed her first stroller ride. Usually she is in a sling, but Gabriella decided she wanted to walk so Juliana tried out riding in the stroller.

In the evening we had Common House, our church's Wednesday night get together. I brought a cake and everyone sang Happy Birthday. It was really nice to be able to celebrate Gabriella's birthday with our church family.

The cake was chocolate with strawberry filling. I was quite relieved that my cake layers didn't slide apart before we could eat it! It was certainly a bit wobbly, but I must say it was pretty tasty. (Once again I must give props to Cherrybrook Kitchens allergy friendly cake mixes.)

Happy Birthday Gabriella Kate!

At 7:39am on August 27th 2005 our beautiful firstborn daughter was born. She weighed 7lbs 6ozs and we fell head over heels in love with her. I adored that squishy black haired newborn but getting to know Gabriella as her own person has been an experience that is beyond amazing.