Our baby girl is ONE!

On Monday, Josephine celebrated her first birthday! And I took about 200 photos that day (no exaggeration). These are just a few of our favorites to share how we celebrated her big day. After a very crazy weekend in NYC, Monday was a bit hectic as well. Luckily Carissa was able to make it, although we won't have her for the next two weeks due to soccer training camps at Xavier. Josie's birthday excitement got started straight away, as she was opening gifts from Carissa by 9am. As expected, she had so much fun with the tissue paper that it was a lot of work to get her to the actual gifts, but that was part of the fun!

Here she is with her great new presents from Carissa - a very cool Melissa & Doug stacker and shape sorter and a new book called "Gossie" that is just too cute. THANKS CARISSA! (This picture also illustrates the teething crisis we are currently working through - note all of the drool on her clothes. She's also had a fever the past three days & has been generally quite miserable. Poor baby.)
And, here she is after Carissa put her in her pretty party dress, because life is too short to not hang out all day in your pretty party dress. And she absolutely loves her new book!So, after a fun day with Carissa that I spent getting everything unpacked and washed after the long weekend away, it was time to celebrate Josie's first birthday as a family.

At exactly 5:25 pm (the time she was born one year ago) - we lit her cupcake candle and sang "Happy Birthday" to our big baby girl. She was totally in awe of the candle!

After "blowing" out her first candle by going "Fuh, Fuh, Fuh" - we set her up with her very own cupcake. It took her awhile to dive in (we joked that she would've been happier with a huge pile of birthday peas) but once she did she was pretty happy -

Ahhh...refined sugar....
Now, this next one is an instant favorites. As many of you know, I'm big into routine/ritual/tradition/etc so this birthday has been SO stressful because we're trying to set some family traditions into motion that we want to continue over the years with all of our children. One of them is the Birthday Crown. I found one at Babies R Us (pictured next below) but that just didn't really do it for me, because I wanted something more special and unique that she could wear every birthday and have forever. Thank heavens for www.esty.com because they had several felt birthday crowns to choose from. When I found this one (complete with a big cupcake on front) I knew it was "the one." Well, lesson learned, Josie didn't like the crown nearly as much as I did but I think this photo is actually even better than one of her just smiling. Well, it really just speaks for itself -
On to presents from Mama & Daddy - no tissue paper in this one because we had other plans for the evening and knew it might be midnight before she got to the actual gift in this big bag if it was filled with paper -

And here she is with her first birthday present from us - her BlaBla monkey - Verdi.
It was love at first sight! (Here she is clapping YAY!)
And getting up close and personal with him - we've just learned "nose" so she was checking his out.
And now for her "perfect gift" that we got in NY - the one that we trekked all over the city to find - A music table! (And whew) - She loves it! Here are some scenes from her first concert & you can be assured that there will be a video coming soon!

After a wardrobe change into her "birthday girl" tshirt, it was time for her big birthday adventure...

We headed out to Fountain Square for a special surprise -

Little did we know that the Fountain would have a special surprise for us as well. Check out that awesome rainbow in the water!
After eating dinner on the Square, the plan was to take Josephine on her first horse-drawn carriage ride. She always points out the horses when we walk around the city and had the time of her life watching all of them in Central Park. So, we knew this would make for the perfect first birthday event. The only trouble was that there were no carriages in sight! We figured it was a bust since it was a Monday, but as we were walking home, I heard the telltale "clop clop" and there it was. YAY! Here we are waiting for the "Cloppy" -

And, try as we might to get a photo of Josie smiling at the camera in front of the horse, she was way more into Bob the Horse than she was posing.

Here we are passing the building where Louie works - And headed back down Fourth St in front of Lytle Park -
The perfect ride ended right in front of our condo where we asked the driver to drop us off (how's that for curbside service). We were actually pretty impressed with the ride. It really did offer a different perspective of the city, and Josie had a great time, too. Josephine's first birthday was an absolute success! We are really looking forward to Saturday's big party which I'm sure will yield a lot more pictures and a lot more memories!