Happy Birthday to our beautiful, happy, ridiculously adorable 1-year-old!!!

We can’t believe she’s already one year old and have no idea how time flew by so fast. At the same time, it seems like she was born forever ago. This last year has been a whirlwind of learning how to be parents and Claire growing to be an independent, silly, and loving little girl.

Here’s an overview of our little 1-year-old Claire:

• Weight: She was 18 1/2 pounds on her birthday last Friday. She’s in the 30th percentile for weight so she’s a petite little one like her mama.

• Loves:
  • Stuffed animals – she loves to give them hugs and open-mouthed kisses!
  • Playing under our kitchen table and chairs. It’s like her own fort.
  • Pushing furniture around the house. For her birthday, we got her a walker (since she loves pushing things around so much) and she is IN LOVE with it!!! I’d like to pat ourselves on the back for a job well done in the birthday present department. She played with it all day on her birthday and it looked like it may have been the best day of her life.
  • Balloons!
  • Playing peek-a-boo
  • To give big hugs while resting her head on us. My heart melts every time.
  • Finger foods – cheese still is her favorite food group but we can also give her pieces of what we’re eating and she loves being able to munch on what we’re having. Somehow, she likes red onions too. That’s a mystery to me since that’s my all-time LEAST favorite food.
  • Walking… everywhere!! Even though she can walk now, she also loves to hold our hands while walking around. It’s so sweet.
  • To share! She’ll hand us her toys or her food. She also thinks it’s hilarious to feed us.

Enjoying her birthday present from Mommy and Daddy

• Hates:
  • The seahorse. You know, the one that I mentioned was one of our baby essentials? Now, when the music comes on she starts crying and gets extremely upset.

• Talents:
  • Walking!! She started walking 2 1/2 weeks ago and is so adorable!! A lot of people warned us to enjoy the time before she can walk because then, everything changes. Yes, everything changed but for the better. I love that she’s an independent little person now and I love hearing the pitter patter of her little footsteps and seeing her smiling face peek around the corner. I think this has been my favorite developmental change so far.
  • She points to things she wants and says “Dat”. We love that she can communicate with us now!
  • We can tell she understands us when we’re talking to her – we can say “What is that?” and she takes off in the opposite direction because she knows she has something she shouldn’t. Or we’ll say “I’m gonna get you” and she always charges toward us (she doesn’t quite get that we’re supposed to chase her 😉 ). I can also ask where Mickey or Winnie the Pooh is and she’ll go get them.

• Sleeping:
  • For the last week (except for last night), she’s been sleeping through the night. This weekend was crazy busy with family in town for her birthday and Mother’s Day so we expected her sleep schedule to be impacted a bit. Even so, she did incredibly well.
  • Lately, Claire has been waking up from her second nap in a crabby mood. She always wakes up from her first nap as happy as can be but not so much from her second. It’s pretty funny because I’m just as crabby when I wake up from naps in the afternoon. Like mother, like daughter. 😉

• Other Random Facts:
  • We had her birthday party on Saturday and it was so fun! I’ll do a post on that specifically. It was so wonderful to have so many of our family and friends come to celebrate Claire’s first birthday (and us surviving the first year of parenthood, yay us!). We are the luckiest people in the world to have such a great support system. Huge thanks to all of our family and friends that came early to help set up for the party!
  • On her birthday, we had a lot of errands to run to prep for her party but we made sure to have our own little celebration complete with present opening, a cupcake, and plenty of play time. Claire is happiest when she can run around and play so we made sure that was at the top of our priority list for the day. We purposely kept it low  key because we knew the rest of the weekend was going to be super busy.

A good example of how Claire felt about having frosting all over her hands – she HATED it. She’s holding it together pretty well in this photo. She had a meltdown when we took her to clean her off.

And that’s our little one year old! We are absolutely loving this stage and love her newfound independence that came with walking. We can’t believe we are now parents of a TODDLER!! How did that happen?!?!