Ethan's 1st birthday

This might be a long blog post as I have a whole weekend of festivities to blog about! About 6 minutes after I finally finished cleaning the whole house, my mother-in-law, my mom, and my sister arrived. I forced my mom and sister to attend a Zumba class with me and although they almost passed out and were quite sore the next day, they reluctantly agreed that it was "lots of fun". Later that day, we attended the long-awaited puppet show at the day care. For those of you lucky unfortunate souls who missed it, here is a video clip.

Later that evening, after a trip to Michael's to buy (what turned out to be the wrong) cake decorating icing colors kit, we got started on creating the Elmo cake masterpiece. Blythe helped by cracking the eggs and licking the bowl.

Yes, that's right - she can crack eggs. Girl's got some skills. She cracks them one handed and has never gotten a shell in the bowl. I have absolutely no idea where she learned this talent.

After we got the cake baked, I finally discovered that the food coloring we bought was the wrong one. Apparently, even though it said Sesame Street on it and had a picture of Elmo, it was actually for Abby Cadaby. It was getting late anyway, so we decided to run to the store in the morning and finish it then. 3 hours of decorating on Saturday morning and we finally had an Elmo cake. Here's a pic of my mom painstakingly creating individual stars to show texture on the cake:

So after 4 hours of cake making, $13 on a cake pan, $5 on the wrong food coloring, $4 on the right food coloring, $4 on icing, and $2 on cake mix, here is the finished product:

Okay, so that's the reason that buying a cake might actually be a good idea (even though our masterpiece is indeed a masterpiece).

Doug and Lynette arrived with baby Ada (their first overnight trip away from home) and after a day of enjoying the ABSOLUTELY BEAUTIFUL weather (that I actually spent picking up all of Fall and Winter's worth of dog poop from the yard - you know you're jealous), we were ready to begin Ethan's 1st birthday party! We had just a few people over and grilled out burgers and hot dogs and then reluctantly had to cut the cake. Ashley's brothers Ben and Matt had called dibs on the eyeballs, so we cut out the nose for Ethan. At first he wasn't quite sure what to do with the large piece of cake in front of him, but then he dug right in.

He totally hit the jackpot on presents from others, which is why Braden and I only got him one thing (though it was a super-duper awesome teeter totter). He also got this giant dump truck (where the $&*%^# we're going to put it...and the teeter totter...and all the other junk great gifts is another story).

On Sunday we spent the morning trying to get Blythe to finally acknowledge her new cousin Ada. At first she was hesitant:

But we finally got her to come around. We then enjoyed a walk to the playground to enjoy the weather a bit more and got a few pics there as well.

In other/related news, Braden and I are the proud new godparents of Ada Lynn Mittendorf. We are so happy and excited about this new role!

Thanks to everyone who was a part of our great weekend! We had a blast (even though my house looks like I never cleaned it in the first place).