Avery's 1st Birthday Party - A Year Later

With Avery's 2nd Birthday party this coming Saturday, I'm now realizing I never posted about her 1st birthday party. Better late than never, right? I've intended to write this post numerous times, but just never got around to doing it. So I'm changing that today. 

Avery's first birthday party was a "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star Theme". It was a lot of fun to plan and decorate for and also a little stressful. Planning a big party with 2 little ones taking up all your attention is hard. After this party, I told myself this was the last party I would stress over. I always try to out-do myself with every party. It just got to be too much and now I've really tried to scale it back as best I can and try to enjoy the party instead of stress over it. So this years party is low-key and at a park where the kids can run and play to their hearts content and hopefully the adults can sit back and watch and enjoy chatting with each other and catching up. The weather is supposed to be 77 and sunny. I couldn't ask for a more perfect day.

But back to last years party. We had the party in our church dining hall and I rented a bounce house for the kids to play in outside. Unfortunately, it rained that day. I kept hoping the rain would stop so I still had them set up the bounce house, much to Jake's dislike. It did stop raining... after the party was pretty much over. Oh well, many of the kids did get a chance to play and I think everyone still had a great time. Avery enjoyed her party very much and loved all the attention she got from all of our friends and family. She was adorable and had fun, so that's really all that matters. 

Party Details:

My mother in law made chicken salad wraps and turkey sandwiches for the adults and my mom and I made star shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids. It was a fun and yummy spread. My sister made Avery's smash cake and pink cupcakes and I made glittery star picks to decorate them with. They turned out so very cute! The colors of the party were pink, mint and gold. I made a majority of the decorations and bought a few as well. My mom put the centerpieces together and it all turned out so cute!

Everyone enjoyed their lunch, especially the birthday girl.

After eating lunch, we sang happy birthday to Avery and let her dig into her smash cake.

After she ate her cake, Grandma and I gave her a much needed bath in the church sink. :-)

After we got her all cleaned up, we let her open all of her presents!!

After opening all of the presents it had finally stopped raining. So we took Avery outside to play in the bounce house.

Going through these pictures again makes me realize just how much Avery has grown in a year. It's so hard to believe we'll be celebrating her second birthday this weekend. She's gotten so big and grown up so much in a year. It's hard to believe how quickly time flies.

Now off to finish up planning for her Peppa Pig Park Party! Hopefully I'm not a year late in sharing all about it here on the blog. ;-)

Welcome Home Wednesday

Stephanie, over at Remembering Chaos, does a Welcome Home Wednesday post every week on her blog. She posts home updates from around her house and I just loved the idea of doing this. So I thought I'd join in the fun and post about a project we did this past weekend at our house. 

When we bought our house last September, the previous owners had recently painted the outside of the house a pale yellow to get it ready to sell. They must have gotten a great deal on the paint because not only did they paint the outside that color, but they painted the whole inside that color as well. (You can see what the house looked like when we bought it here.) I love a bright, fun yellow. In fact, I'm using yellow in our kitchen/dining/living room but this yellow was not a bright, fun yellow. Instead it was kind of a sad yellow and we couldn't wait to get rid of it on the inside and the outside.

Before we moved in, we painted the inside walls, but hadn't gotten a chance to do the outside. So this past weekend, we started on this very time-consuming, yet necessary project. I got the idea for a color here. They used Anonymous by Sherwin Williams and used their Duration outdoor paint. I love the way it looked with their brick house so I thought it would look great on our house too. So we went for it and got started Saturday morning. By the end of Saturday we had pretty much finished painting the front of the house.We had originally planned on just painting the iron beams to match, but later decided to just go for it and replace them with white square beams instead. This was always what we wanted to do, but thought we'd just paint them for the time being. After we realized painting them was just too hard, we decided to have my dad replace them and I'm so glad we did. The house looks 100% better now!

Sunday after church, my dad started on the beams and Jake and I got started on painting the back of the house. We got nearly half-way done painting the back and my dad got 2 posts in by Sunday evening. Monday morning, my dad finished the posts and that's where we are at this point. We still need to touch up a few spots on the front, finish the back and also paint the sides. Thankfully, the sides are mostly brick, just a little bit of siding up top. Here's what the back and sides of the house look like, so you can see what we have to paint.

There are several other outdoor projects we want to do which include replacing the front doors with something like these and removing the screen doors, adding some furniture to the front porch, adding railing to the front porch in between the beams like this, adding a new mailbox and sprucing up the landscaping all around. We also want to replace the old garage door with one like this, replace the upper deck and replace the fence with a white, 6 foot vinyl fence. Of course, these will happen over time, but we're excited to have gotten started on making the outside of our house look so much better and we can't wait until it's all finished. I'll keep you all posted on our updates as we have several in the works inside and out. It's a huge work in progress and we're really trying to enjoy every minute of turning this house into the home we want it to be.

Five on Friday

 

Happy Friday!

Today I'm linking up with Christina, April and Natasha for Five on Friday!

Jackson is playing Tee-Ball again this Spring and he's having a lot of fun. So far we've just had practices, but he has his first game on the 23rd of this month! He practices every Tuesday night and he's doing really well.  

 Jackson is also playing Soccer this Spring. It's his first season of soccer. They just have practices and games all together on Saturday mornings. The first game was on the Saturday we were in Costa Rica so we had to miss it. My dad took him and said he did pretty good during the practice, but didn't really go after the ball during the game. So he may need a little more practice with soccer, but I'm glad he's at least getting a feel for it and enjoys it. We will get to go to his game tomorrow, so I'm excited to see him play!

We have Avery's 2nd birthday party coming up next weekend! We are having it at the park near our house and as of right now, the weather is supposed to be really nice so I'm excited!! It's a Peppa Pig theme because Avery LOVES Peppa Pig. It's by far her favorite show! I can't believe she's going to be 2 already!

I've got Avery signed up for a 6-Week Gym Explorers class for Tuesday mornings in May and part of June. I'm excited to see how she does. It should be a lot of fun for her to get out of the house and possibly make some new little friends!! I'll be taking her to her first class and then my mom will have to take her after that since I'll be working, but hopefully she loves it and maybe we can find a few other fun things for her to do this summer.

Jake and I had a wonderful time in Coast Rica last week. I hope to blog about our trip at some point soon. As always, I took a ton of pictures, so I'm still going through them. I'll leave you with one of my favorites. A picture I took while we were in the rainforest of a momma hummingbird sitting on her nest. I just love hummingbirds. They remind me of my Grammy who adored them. She would have loved to have seen this momma sitting on her nest.

A Walk in the Park

This past Sunday, I took the kids for a little walk down to the park around the corner from our house. I love having a park within walking distance to our house. It was a huge selling point when we were looking at houses last Summer. Around the park, there is a walking trail, which makes this park even more fun. So I decided to take the kids around the walking trail to check it out before heading to the playground. 

We've played at the playground numerous times, but hadn't had a chance to check out the trail. I was pleasantly surprised at how nice it was. It's not real long, but just long enough. It's all paved and there are 3 or 4 little walking bridges that go over a little creek. I believe this may be the same little creek that runs directly behind our house. 

The kids and I had a lot of fun outside exploring our new neighborhood. I'm looking forward to more exploring this Spring and Summer.