Shasta's 1st Birthday and Party

I know this is a month late. Summer school literally started 4 days after Spring Semester. I feel like I haven't had a single moment to myself let alone time to blog and do leisurely things! Summer classes are SO fast paced and for some strange reason, I thought I could handle 3 classes at once with a 4th one starting in just over a week. Aahhh!!!

Anyway... onto Shasta's birthday. I didn't feel the need to go all out and do something fancy. I figure since she won't remember it, there's no point in going broke trying to make it extra special. Her actual birthday was a Wednesday and Nick had to work all night so we didn't even do a special birthday dinner. She got up and opened some presents in the morning, but we didn't get through all of them because she got super grumpy and needed a nap.

We went a little overboard on presents, but most of them were necessities. She was in desperate need of clothes to grow into and she needed some developmental toys since most of what she had was for a much younger age group.

Simple decorations.

I even blew up some balloons which says a lot because I HATE balloons!

And I cringed with every scratching sound her hand made while playing with them.

If you look closely you can see a scratch down her cheek. Wedge jumped off the couch and his foot caught her face. This was the start of her grumpiness that lead to an early nap!

This girl sure can make a mess. Remember the balloon picture? The room was completely clean other than a few balloons on the floor! Part of the mess is a box of tissues that I gave her to do what she wanted with. Most all the tissues she pulled out of the box she "blew her nose in" first before getting a new one. Silly girl!

She loved pulling the clothes out of the bag and hucking them behind her so she could get another one.

Nick is so good at taking pictures! I love this one!

Then came her birthday party. We did it the Saturday after her birthday so all of Nick's family could come. It was just a family party and since my family lives in Arizona (pretty much), it was just her Hendricks family that was there. We had the party at a local park because we thought it would be more comfortable for 17 people to gather than in our little home. Little did we know it was going to be FREEZING the whole time and right at the beginning Animal Control showed up and made us take Wedge home.

The family cake. Nick did an awesome job. For a first attempt at fondant, I think it turned out awesome!

Shasta's personal cake. If you can't tell, the cakes are supposed to look like Shasta Soda cans!!!

It was too windy to light the candle, but she wouldn't have blown it out anyway so no big deal.

No offense to Nick and his cake making ability, but I knew it wasn't going to taste that great since he didn't use much frosting between the layers and fondant doesn't make for the greatest taste, I decided to make cupcakes too. One of Nick's sister's thought it was actually ice cream which made my day!

Shasta wasn't a fan of her party hat. We used these same hats at Wedge's 1st birthday party too!

She was a fan of the cake! Nick had to cut it in half because she couldn't quite dig into it with the layer of fondant, but she did her best to eat it all. She probably consumed close to half of it before we took it away.

Time for presents!!!

All the Hendricks cousins (and 2 mommies). Notice there are only girls. That's right, 7 granddaughters!

Family picture minus Wedge since he got kicked out of the park. So sad.

Shasta's birthday was a lot of fun, but I'll admit, I'm glad it's over. It falls right at the end of Spring Semester so it's a high stress time anyway with final projects and tests so it was nice to have it checked off the list of things to do! It's hard to believe she's already a year old. It's amazing to me how fast the first year actually goes and it's made me want to appreciate every phase a little more. We're approaching the tantrum stage though so we'll see how I feel about appreciating every moment in the next few months!

Side note: I've been wanting to get her 1 Year Pictures up, but my computer doesn't have a disc drive in it and I've been too busy (lazy) to pull out the external disc drive to get them loaded onto my computer. Hopefully in the next few days I'll get it done though because they're super cute and everyone should get to share in the joy!