By Popular Demand

For the little Dollface's birthday party I prepared a slide show of photos of her first year. I hadn't intended on posting it because it's kind of a long slide show. 12 minutes long. (I'm a mom, and to me, ALL photos are important. I had a rough time narrowing it down to 12 minutes as it is!)

And besides, most of the photos included have already made their way to my blog over the past year, so it would mainly be repeats.

But a few people have requested that I post the slide show, so here it is. All 12 minutes of it. Enjoy the Amelia Fest!

Make a Smilebox free slideshow

Big Move to the Big Apple

By the way, did you all know that my little family and I are moving to New York for the summer?

It is the truth.

The L'Oreal Brandstorm marketing competition I mentioned that Pete and his team won a while ago lead to him spending some time in New York a couple of weeks ago being wined and dined, or watered and dined as the case may be, and then offered a summer internship in their professional products division.

The irony here, for those of you who don't know Pete very well, is that the man has never been inside a salon in his life. He cuts his own hair with peanut shaped clippers and the assistance of the bathroom mirror. But apparently the selection committee at L'Oreal USA thought he'd be a perfect match for their professional product division and are very enthusiastic about having him.

Lovely.

Its even a paid internship. Even better.

So I plan on getting myself a museum pass and wandering around Manhattan all summer with Amelia and Bob while Pete works in the fast paced New York beauty industry. Whoever would have thought?

Oh, and to prepare for my brief stint as a city girl, I just signed up for a short photography class. If you want to learn to take beautiful pictures too, sign up here.

Valentine's Day; the Calm before the Storm

I know. It’s almost March. The traditional ‘Day of Love’ has far left us and I am only now recording our celebration. But with my baby’s birthday the day after Valentine’s Day and the busy preparations I was making for her party (which included; baking, printing photos, framing photos, making/purchasing party decorations and cleaning my house) Valentine’s Day nearly got lost in the shuffle.

Lucky for me, I happened to have foresight this year. Not a common occurrence. I ordered a gift for my darlin boy three weeks in advance, so it even arrived on time. It was the ultimate romantic valentine’s Day gift;



Those of you who know my sweet baby understand why this is the perfect gift for him.

Also, very luckily for me, while I was insanely busy planning and preparing the birthday party of the century on top of work, Relief Society and generally keeping the babydoll from tearing the house to pieces, Pete made plans for Valentine's Day. It isn't as if he wasn't as overloaded as I was; the man had just gotten back from a week in New York being schmoozed by L'Oreal and missing work and classes, so he had a bit of catching up to do himself. Plus he was in charge of creating a masterpiece of a birthday cake.

But he still found time to observe Valentine's Day (or at least the day before Valentine's Day, as the big V Day landed on a Sunday this year in case you don't remember). This is what he did:

He took me to a BYU basketball game. That may not sound like the height of romance to some of you, but our first date was a BYU basketball game, so it felt romantic to me. Kindof. Besides, we love to watch BYU sports together. It's part of what we do and who we are as a couple. So it was a perfect start to our Valentine's Day evening.Especially because they killed Air Force. Nothing says romance like a good slaughter fest.

Then, he took me to dinner. A real date-type dinner, the kind that doesn't include asking our server for a high-chair (he had arranged for a babysitter as well--big points there). We went here:



And ate lots of meat. Honestly, I don't think there was a vegetable anywhere in sight, unless you can feel good about counting the onion rings, which were roughly the size and thickness of Krispy Kremes.

Last of all, when we got home Pete gave me roses and candy. But these were no ordinary roses, they were made of fondant icing and supported in a vase of jelly bellies.

So it was a perfect Man's Valentine's Day; a basketball game, an overload of meat and edible roses. I couldn't have felt more loved or lucky to have such a wonderful sweetheart.

Mother Goose Birthday Party

In the aftermath of Babygirl's birthday party I managed to lose my camera and didn't unearth it until this morning when I had to clean before the visiting teachers showed up.

However, find it I did, and now I can finally post photos from Amelia's party. I decided on a Mother Goose Theme for her party--primarily because over a year ago I found an old Jesse Wilcox Smith Mother Goose collection in my parent's basement, and have been cutting it up for fabulous wall art for the nursery among other things--much to the horror of my younger sister, who is an art student and can't comprehend how I could desecrate a Jesse Wilcox Smith like that--sorry Dede. Despite her objections, I decided to continue the Mother Goose theme to be consistent.

I used framed nursery rhyme prints, as well as framed pictures of the birthday girl for party decor.

My husband, cake artist extraordinaire made the the birthday cake. It was supposed to have Little Bo Peep on it as well as her sheep, but as we ran out of time, Little Bo Peep got cut. So just the sheep make an appearance on the cake, but they turned out pretty cute, and I thought it looked darling. The Babes seemed to enjoy it as well, as you will see in the following photos.

Make a Smilebox free photo slideshow

The last few pics are of a new tradition I'm trying to start for first birthdays in our family. Amelia and I sprouted an apple seed in a glass on the window sill for a few weeks, and for her birthday we planted it. I like the idea of all my kids having a tree or a rosebush or something planted for them on their first birthday. Luckily, as we are only renting here, Jonny Apple Tree won't be big enough to need to be in the ground for a few years yet.

Specs in Pics

So, as many of you know my baby got glasses, and they are not nearly as horrifying as I had anticipated. She looks pretty blasted cute in them. I think she might have the edge in the distracting-baby-at-church poll now due to sheer novelty. She even keeps them on pretty well, except for when she’s in her car seat and she knows I can’t get to her. She’s also figured out that if I’m busy and not paying attention to her, she can get my attention fast by ripping off her glasses and throwing them against a wall. It took her all of three days to figure that out. Smart little stinker.

One sure sign that the spectacles truly can’t be too bad is that I had Amelia’s one year photos taken, and she’ wearing the glasses in some of the photos. The photo shoot was done by the ever talented Lesley Colvin (check out her photography blog, I totally recommend and shamelessly endorse her)! We shot on two different locations and I love the two strikingly different looks we ended up with. Here are a few of my faves:








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I bought the sailor dress before she was even born. I adore the classic, timeless look of sailor suits, and besides it was a pretty good price at T.J. Maxx.

Superwonder Mama

So guess who went running this morning? That would be me--and a lot of other people, incidentally. The BYU field house track is alarmingly crowded at 9:00 on Saturday mornings.

But the point is I went. And I ran. Most of the time. Amelia, BOB and I were racing around that track at the speed of, well something not very fast, but we were doing it. That's how I started out my day as a Superwonder Mama.

Then I came home and the babe actually took a nap so I could get showered, and THEN I finished the Visiting Teaching list for February. It probably should have been done a week ago, but I got it done before the first Sunday of the month, and that is a feat, let me tell you.

I got some housework done, mailed off the bills, ate nutritious, low calorie meals, and did the grocery shopping without overspending and buying stuff that wasn't on my list. I played with and read books to my baby and then worked on Amelia's baby book.

And I made dinner tonight for a sister in my ward who is sick. I even delivered it on time.

That is when I decided I must have some sort of super powers. If I had written a letter to my congressman and spent a hour indexing names I could have run for Perfect Mormon Mom of the year.

I decided that I better write all this down because I don't think I've ever been this productive on a Saturday in my life, and realistically, it isn't likely to happen again. So if this sounds extremely bragful, don't worry. I lack the organization skills and the motivation to keep this kind of life up for more than 24 hours. Next Saturday will undoubtedly find me sleeping in and wondering where I left keys and cell phone. Again.

Update

I suppose I owe it to my (many, many) concerned readers to give an update on the whole eye-crossing situation.

Well my baby needs glasses.

In three days and two (very long) doctor appointments it was determined that she is extremely far-sighted and that the strain of trying to focus on objects nearer to her finally caused her to start crossing her eyes. She needs glasses and will likely be in them until she is about 10 years old, at which point she may be ready to switch to contacts.

So that's it. A lifetime of corrective eye-wear starts now, just before her first birthday.

It would be dishonest to say that I was thrilled, or even relieved. I actually cried for most of the weekend.

But it could be so much worse. Before we got the verdict I had spent a good deal of time online researching all the different things that could cause a baby to go cross-eyed. Horrible things, like brain tumors, strokes, lazy eye muscles and other permanent disorders. My girl just has super-human long range vision and needs glasses to control it.

Of course I started looking for all the places I could find that carried glasses frames for tiny faces, and came up with exactly 2 in the entire county. They both offered the same 3 frame styles to choose from, all made by Fisher Price. Actually, there were only 2 styles, but one style was offered in 2 colors.

These are the frames we picked out:




Except pink. They only come in pink and blue. They should be ready in about a week.

I'm actually starting to feel much better about the whole ordeal. I still don't love the idea of my baby having to wear glasses while she is so small (how am I going to teach a 1 year old to keep her glasses on?) but she is just such a happy little person in general that I'm having a hard time mourning for her.

I do, however, reserve the right to completely freak out if her glasses arrive and they give her huge, distorted bug eyes. I knew a girl in high school with the most unfortunate thick glasses that made her eyes look massive and blurry. If Amelia's glasses do that, I'm going to start searching European countries for pediatric eye surgery options.