Rowan's 1st birthday

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As you all know (since I must have mentioned it at least 100 times by now) Rowan turned 1 year old on Friday, April 4th. We had a birthday party for him on Saturday. The whole thing was a ton of fun and I am so incredibly happy to be at the point in my life where I am throwing a birthday bash for my own baby. It's surreal. It feels like it was just yesterday that I was wearing my own party dresses and playing hot potato in my parents basement at my own birthday party. I don't know when I became old enough to have a baby and bake special birthday cakes for him and celebrate one whole year of his life, but it happened. And it feels amazing.

Actually, it feels more than amazing. It feels like everything all at once. Every single emotion. I think that the only way to really describe it is to say that it's overwhelming. This past year has been the most challenging, exhausting, rewarding, empowering year of my life. Rowan is such a fun, curious and happy baby. Happy really is one of his defining characteristics. That kid just loves life. It's amazing to see. Getting to spend my days with that kind of happiness and those giant toothy smiles (5 teeth now!) is just about the best thing ever. I feel very blessed.

Rowan's birthday was a blast. He thoroughly enjoyed the day with friends and family. A few funny details about the day: I made those paper buntings and put up a photo for each month of the year to show how much he grows and changes every month. Completely accidentally he is wearing a different hand knit in 8 of the 12 photo's! I let him off the hook and didn't dress him in knits June through September, but the rest of the year was all knits, all the time. Funny right?

I baked that awesome 3D panda cake myself and am incredibly proud of it! I rented the pan and everything. It took me all day to make, I'd never done anything like that before, but man was it cool. I may have cried once during the process and expressed super dramatically that I was a total failure because my panda's right arm looked weird, but I pulled myself together and Rowan's panda cake looked great. I also made cupcakes because though the panda looked awesome I was pretty sure that it was going to taste like a brick of sugar, I was wrong, it was totally edible. But the cupcakes were a delicious bonus too. Rowan, however, preferred the pineapple... I could have just made him a fruit salad and called it a day - ha!
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