Jaylee's First Birthday

She's ONE WHOLE YEAR OLD!  I can't imagine there is anything like the feeling you get when your first daughter turns one year old.  I'm so proud of myself for keeping her alive for an entire year! I'm proud of her for putting up with my "new parent" mistakes, I'm proud of my husband for helping my sleep deprived body find caffeine in the morning more times than I can count.  I'm also incredibly proud of how well the decorations turned out!

The party went off without a hitch, well there was one hitch, the cake almost didn't happen.  I planned to make a cake with perfectly smooth butter cream frosting and a few modern, minimalist decorations on it but after spending several hours trying to smooth out the frosting between 4 VERY dense layers of cake I had to give up and create "plan B" which was SUPER easy, took all of 20 minutes and turned out even better than my original!

A recipe and instructions for making this monster of a cake are in the works but if you WANT IT RIGHT NOW!  Just leave it in the comments and I'll try to bump it up in my priority list.  Until then, enjoy the photos!   The theme was "pearls and lace" a throw back to Jaylee's southern heritage.

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Engagement Party!

The engagement party was a HUGE success!  We had a wonderful time putting on a great shin dig for an amazing sister in law who deserved all of it and more.  The decorations came together without a hitch, the guests were on time and in good spirits and the party lasted late enough without going on TOO long for these parents-of-a-one-year-old.

While the guests and engaged couple were feeling a little camera shy, I thought I'd splash some inspiration at you guys so you could see just what a great time we had!  If you'd like a how-to on any decoration in particular just leave it in the comments and I'll see if I can't whip one up :-)

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Exer-AWESOME

The Evenflo Exersaucers are simply amazing.  That's the best way I can describe them.  We have this one Jump and Learn by Evenflo which we simply adore while my inlaws have this one Triple Fun by Evenflo which both they and Jaylee LOVE.  They are both fantastic and I can't recommend them enough.  


While this post is in no way sponsored by Evenflo, we got our exersaucers the old fashion way via paying for them with money (or rather we registered for it and we're lucky enough to get it) I just LOVE them!
We tried the swing which Jaylee liked but we didn't use it as much as we might have because we were battling a lot of sleep issues and were worried that the motion from the swing was making those issues worse.  The exersaucer on the other hand was a WONDERFUL way to keep Jaylee entertained during her waking moments and fully engaged with her toys.  Here she is at 8 months having a BALL!

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Meeting the Neighbors!

We moved into our current house at the end of Nov 2012, as of May 2013 we still have no idea who our neighbors are so I decided to take a page out of Bree Van de Kamp's book and bring them each a basket of muffins!  I made three types of muffins to suite every palate: blueberry, cinnamon and raspberry and they all turned out WONDERFULLY as you can see above.

The plan panned our wonderfully and I'm pleased to report we have exchanged smiles, stories and contact information with all THREE of our lovely neighbors!  I'm taking this to mean we shouldn't ever be afraid to take the first step in meeting new people, and bringing baked goods never hurts!

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