Twelve Months! Happy Birthday Baby!!!

Happy Birthday to our precious ONE YEAR OLD Lollypop!

WHAT A YEAR!!!  (How's that for Understatement Of The Year?)

Since the moments of our all-night-long labor, you have been blessed with health and strength and you were a blessed answer to a LOT of prayers.  You "belong" to your church, my love.  Oh, how many precious brothers and sisters prayed for you during the days when we were so nervous about you staying on this earth.  And, precious girl, you truly belong to our Lord who we pray you will come to know and love as you continue your journey in this world.

And what have you been up to this past month?  Well, I suppose the news we should share first is that you have begun to walk!  You took your first tentative steps all by your widdle self this past month.  You can now walk unaided for 7-8 steps in a row, and you still giggle when you get finished with them. You haven't quite decided to just forgo all crawling yet.  But, I'm sure that within the next couple of months, we can expect to see you all over the place!

You are eating more and beginning to drink milk.  You have turned around in your car seat (we cheated and turned you around a week early - yay!).  You have cut yet another tooth.  (This makes 8!)  Your golden hair has gotten long enough that it can be pulled back with a little bow (yay!), although the bow has to have hot glue strips on the clip of the bow in order to keep it from sliding out of your hair.

Reaching for Daddy!  She wasn't too interested in her progress picture this time.  Mostly wanted to laugh at people and get down off of the chair.

You are still chattering at all things, still love Custard, still love your siblings.  You will still stop whatever you are doing and crawl-race for the door when you hear Daddy come in at the end of the day.  I have this yellow shirt from the vet that PopPop worked for a while back that has a picture of a dog and a cat on it.  Whenever I wear it, you point to the dog and look at me with a huge grin so that I will say "dog" to you.  Then we do it with the picture of the "cat".  Then we do this little "game" over and over and over.  It's little things like this yellow shirt that I hope I don't forget.  You are so sweet and precious and yummy and squishy and wonderful!

We have a special day planned for you!  Since it's Sunday, we of course will be going to church.  And then we will meet as much of your immediate family that could be in town today for lunch up at the Club.  We all pitched in to make your cupcakes and had a grand time.  Heck, even PopPop got in on the act by holding the icing bag yesterday afternoon so we could make different color flowers.  That's the fun of being the third baby.  You get the privilege of having your big brother and sister be such a big part of things.

Tooter helping to cut out the bee wings out of the modeling chocolate.  He and Poodle took turns and each did half of the wings.

The bees were a big deal around the house this week.  We were all involved in making them out of modeling chocolate.  Your whole cupcake is edible!  (Mommy's been watching too much Cake Boss on TLC).  Homemade chocolate cake, of course, because crumbly dark cupcakes make a much bigger mess for pictures.  :-)

Putting the bees on top of the cuppy cakes!  It was momentous, people.  Truly momentous.

There are so many things in our life for which we are so grateful to God, but our children are top of the list.  We have been given a great gift with you and Poodle and Tooter.  And I hope that I am able to let y'all know just how deeply you are a part of each breath we take.  How every decision we make is done with you three in mind.  How much, how completely, how utterly we love you!  And we'll get your big-one-year-old-girl photos made within the next couple of weeks.

Happy Birthday precious honey bee girl!  We are excited about celebrating YOU today!