Birthday Festivities!

Sorry for the delay in posting the deets of Chad's birthday weekend.  He was busy doing big important one-year-old stuff and needed us to accompany him and be his chauffeur.

Birthday weekend started out with a not-so-fun aspect of turning one: His doctor appointment was on Thursday.  Here are the highlights:  He's 22 pounds 11.5 ounces (50th percentile) so his weight gain has been stalled for a few months, but he's still right where he should be.  He's 29.75 inches tall (47th percentile). His head has dropped to the 70th percentile, so he's less of a bobblehead.  The doctor said he can have either whole or 2% milk, and is free to eat anything he wants now.  (Last night he tried fish and loved it.) She was impressed with his palate, and laughed when we told her some of the things he's been eating (quinoa, artichokes, cilantro...) He got a visit from the NEST folks, who took a cheek swab from him, and he got $10 for that.  We also have a survey to fill out which will earn him another $10, and later this week he'll be wearing an accelerometer for 72 hours, which will be another $10.  Life is good when you're a lab rat.

But then the bad part came: three shots and a finger prick.  He did OK for the shots, and was done crying as soon as we picked him up. It was the finger prick that ticked him off.  The nurse just kept squeezing and squeezing his poor pricked finger, and he hollered and thrashed and gave everyone around him death stares.  Lucky for him, his iron levels came back within the normal range (although not high enough to donate platelets) so there will be no more finger pricking for now.  He goes back next month for a flu booster shot, and then again in February.

On Friday, we woke him up by singing "Happy Birthday" to him, and let him open a few presents, but then it was off to school.  His classroom hung a sign up for him, and one of his teachers gave him $1 for his piggy bank. After school he opened some more presents.

This is the face he makes whenever he sees a camera now.  (Sometimes there are arm motions to go along with it.)

After he's done being cheesy, we get a nicer smile.

After presents it was time for bed.  It's no fun to sleep on your birthday, but we had work to do in the kitchen for the party, and Chad had a big day ahead of him and needed his rest.
Chad's party was bug-themed, and he had about 20 guests come to drink beer and give him hugs. Our balloons blew away and our Beer Caramel candies didn't soldify, but I think Chad still had fun. I wanted to take pictures of him and all the ladies he charmed, but my camera got buried under a bruschetta recipe for the duration of the party, and I didn't get as many pictures as I wanted. :( 
I had scoured the interwebz for bug-themed birthday supplies, but could only find ladybugs, and ladybugs are for sissies.  So we settled for bug-themed snacks.

They were supposed to be bumblebees. (Use your imagination.)

 Ritz cracker spiders.  This was Andy's handiwork.

Heart-shaped cookies, because everyone loves Chad!

And of course there was cake!  He got two cakes this year, because I was afraid the caterpillar cake wouldn't work, and needed a back-up bug cake.

You'll have to turn your head sideways to fully appreciate this cake.  It's rotated properly on my computer, but has uploaded to Blogger sideways twice now, and I'm giving up.

First we all sang to him, and he was bewildered by that.



"Why are all these people making noise, and why is that dessert on fire?"

He started with a nice piece of the chocolate cake:



And then had a taste of the lemon caterpillar cake:



I have a video of the cake eating, but I need to figure out how to edit it.  (As in, I need to figure out how to mute it and remove the background conversation Andy and I had while I was filming it.  We weren't saying anything bad, but it distracts from the cuteness.)
Chad's party wore him out.  He was asleep by 6:00 and slept straight through until 7:00 the next morning... and that was 7:00 after the time change, so it would have been 8:00 otherwise.
But we weren't done celebrating yet!  Sunday we went to Marbles in Raleigh for some kids museum fun.  Marbles has lots of neat things for kids, but Chad will probably get more out of it in a year or so.  They have a small "crawlers" area that wasn't as fun as the one we went to in Rocky Mount, but Chad still explored, met other babies, and rolled around on the foam shapes.