Ellie's first birthday

Poor Ellie was sick on her 1st birthday. She was a little grumpy and a lot miserable and I sang "it's my party and I'll cry if I want to, cry if I want to, cry if I want to..." on her behalf several times on Friday. We spent the majority of the day doing every day stuff like going to the grocery store, taking naps, picking Josh up from work, and going to the post office. She didn't have any special dinner requests so we had a simple meal and moved onto to presents.

Ellie enjoyed opening her gifts and Harrison was more than willing to help. In fact, he even broke into our closet on Thursday night and opened her present from Uncle Nate and Aunt Jami. I was putting Ellie to bed when he came into her room holding the unwrapped toy and said "look!" in a very proud and excited (and sheepish) tone. Ellie received some cute new clothes, 2 baby dolls, a car, a couple of books, a car toy, a giraffe (plastic, not a live one), and a Mrs. Potato Head. She turned the baby dolls' headbands into bracelets for herself (if it can go around her wrist, it becomes a bracelet--she's all-girl that way).

After presents, we moved onto the cake. When I asked Harrison what kind of cake we should make for Ellie he said she wanted a pink one; so that's what we did. Harrison and I made a pink square cake per Ellie's request. After I put the candles in, I turned to get some plates from the cupboard. Meanwhile, Ellie reached out with her go-go gadget arm, grabbed the edge of the cake plate, and pulled the cake right off the table and onto the floor. In true "America's Funniest Home Videos" fashion, the cake landed upside down and rather smashed. Josh managed to get the majority of it back on the cake plate. And after a week of caring for sick kids and being sick myself, I just didn't care about the sanitary implications of eating a cake off the floor. So we lit the candles, sang "Happy Birthday" (which Ellie politely clapped after), and helped Ellie blow out her first birthday cake candles. I gave Ellie a piece of cake and after some hesitation, she dug right in.

Here is a video of Ellie eating her cake. Sorry it's sideways, I'm too lazy to fix it.