Andi's First Birthday!

Cake!  Little girl has mama's sweet tooth!

I know that I am SUPER late posting this, but for those of you who may have come looking and found that the website was down for a few months, that is why.  Apparently the company that owns the blogging site changed hands and implemented new formatting policies that my blog wasn't meeting, so they temporarily shut it down.  This has now been fixed with some new formatting and I'm trying to play catchup.  Andi's first birthday was only 4 months ago...

We invited a whole slew of friends and family over to celebrate Andi's first birthday party.  My parents were in town from FL for the weekend too and Andromeda had a lot of fun playing with Grandma and Papa!  Since we were anticipating a lot of kids we were hoping to have most of the festivities outside with our yard games, bubbles and play dough in the goodie bags, and a large collection of sidewalk chalk set out for the kids.  Naturally the weather did not cooperate and so to make the inside of the house more appealing, we instead decided to go with a room filled with balloons, which the kids seemed to enjoy just as much!

Balloons!  The amazing part is that some of these still exist in our house and Andi still loves them!

That cheesy smile steals my heart every time~

I half expected Andromeda to have a melt down with all of the people around, staring at her.  However she seemed to take it all in stride.  I attribute this to S's frequent need to socialize and hold game/movie nights with friends.  Andi was all about playing with all of the big kids who came to visit and was not at all shy about digging in to her carrot cake smash cake!  She favored a "no hands" approach...

Homemade carrot cake with cream cheese frosting!

Look ma, no hands!

Kiddo dug right in and was loving her cake!

We requested no gifts from our fellow party goers and instead asked for donations for the local animal shelter in League City since Andromeda is so fond of her fur animal brothers and sisters.  Of course not everyone complied, and we did get her a gift or two ourselves in addition to buying a number of bulk food and care items for the shelter.  One of her favorite gifts was her new baby doll that she could feed a bottle to.  The following weekend we took Andromeda to the pet shelter with us to donate all of the goods we'd collected.  She loved getting to see a bunch of the kitties up in the front office while we were there, though we opted not to take her back into the pens with the dogs on this trip as they were quite loud.

Feeding baby doll

Andromeda's new trike from Grandma and Papa

Before our parents left the party, S and I pulled them aside to give them them some exciting parting news- that Andi was going to be a big sister!  Baby Chladek #2 is due Fourth of July!  Andromeda really doesn't understand yet, but she's SUPER helpful with all of the babies at daycare and so we think that she'll love being mommy's big girl helper when little brother or sister comes along (it's going to be a surprise again!)

Baby Chladek #2 due Fourth of July!