Books!

One of Cooper's favorite activities lately is reading books! She gathers them up from all over the house and brings them to us to read to her. If I am sitting down, she walks over to me, turns around and plops down into my lap. I love it so much!

 I tried to take some pictures of her this morning bringing me her books. It's hard to take pictures of her - she moves so fast!

 Most of the time, we open the book, start reading a page or two, and then she is off to do something else. She doesn't sit still for long.

I love how much she loves books! And I love those big blue eyes!

Laughing at Daddy

New Blog!

I am starting a new blog! Since Cooper was born, we wanted to have her own blog just for her, because so much of the first year is spent doing month updates and writing about things that are specific to Cooper. As she has gotten closer to one though, more and more of my posts on the girls' blogs have been the same because they do almost everything together!

Part of our motivation for having two separate blogs was also that each year after their birthdays I print off their blogs into a book. It's a great scrapbook of the year and the blog books are some of our most favorite things in the world! For Cooper's first year, I wanted to make sure it was specific to her and included all her updates.

Now that she is one though, and we won't be doing the month updates, we are going to start just posting in one blog...eventually. I did some research and contacted the company that we use to do the blog books and found out that we can't slurp more than one blog into a book. So what I will do now is start blogging for Cooper on the new blog and keep blogging for Kendall on her blog. When her birthday comes in February, I'll print off her blog book and then stop writing on that blog and only write on the one new blog. Clear as mud? I felt like it was so complicated to figure out how to best work this so that I still had a full year in each girl's blog books! Hopefully this will be a good solution.

All that being said, the new blog address is www.theymakeuslaugh.blogspot.com. I haven't done much on there yet other than set it up, but that is where I'll blog for Cooper and then come February it will be the only blog we use. Sorry to be so confusing! Thanks for following us this far...see you over there! :)

Last Party Post...Promise :)

I know this is a ton of posts just for Cooper's party...but, Jenny took some pictures for us and they were so great I just wanted to put a few on the blog!

This is my favorite! I love those big beautiful eyes!

Cake on the nose!

Not photoshopped...her waist really is that tiny and her belly is that big! She's so cute!

And that's all for Cooper's first year blog book!! It's been the best year ever and we can't wait to see what new adventures we have this next year!

The rest of the party!

Family picture before the party: I love my sweet family!
The kids had so much fun splashing in all the pools! And, it's been just a little cooler lately, so we could actually stand being outside.

Love this little splash pad we borrowed from Patrick. And love that Patrick was able to come to the party!

She wasn't too sure about the water today! You never know...

Kendall and Sarah!

So thankful for all our friends that came to celebrate Cooper with us! We love our friends and family.

Gracie wanted to bring her slip-n-slide, so we set that up and the kids all loved it! Randy had fun throwing them down it, too!

Birthday girl! Eating more cake!

We decided to bring all the presents outside so we could just open them while the kids played. Cooper opened Holly's present first and there was a ring pop in there, which she LOVES, so she played with that in my lap while I opened the rest of the presents.

Raggedy Ann doll that Jan made! She made one for Kendall's first birthday too - they are so special!

We were so excited for Cooper's party to be here, and I thought it couldn't have gone any better! Great weather, great friends, great cake and so much fun!! Happy birthday sweet Cooper!!

Cooper's Birthday Party...Cake!

Here's the sweet birthday girl before her party!

And then very quickly, the shirt came off and we got ready to eat some cake!
Kendall loved singing Happy Birthday to her sister!

And she also loved helping her blow out her candle!

Cooper got a taste of her cake.... ...and then didn't stop! She loved it so much!

Handful by handful...

We let her sit there and eat it for awhile while everyone else got their cake and ice cream.

But about when the cake got to this point, we realized she had eaten a lot of cake and ice cream and we should probably put a stop to it at some point!

When I picked the cake up and took it from her, she squealed so loud! She was not happy with me.

Love the icing on her nose! She loved her cake and we loved watching her eat it!

Cooper's 1st Birthday Party...Decorations!

Saturday was Cooper's birthday party! We have had so much fun preparing for and planning for her party and we were excited for it to finally be here. I'm going to do several posts, because of course we took a ton of pictures! :)
Kiki got Cooper this super cute outfit a couple of months ago for her to wear when she turned one. I loved it so much and decided to plan the party theme around the colors in the outfit. It had bright blue and pink with some accents of green and zebra. So fun!
Here is the invite. Gigi took Cooper to have her pictures made for her birthday, so we used one of the pictures on the invitation. Randy made it - I was way impressed with how he was able to pull the cupcake off the shirt and add it to the frame.
We had so much fun making the decorations and setting up the house. I love reading different blogs and have been looking at Pinterest for awhile for ideas. I also love reading my friend Lindsay's blog and seeing all the cute parties her and her friends throw. Lots of my ideas came from her - thanks for your help Linds!

I made this bunting and these flowers - both were so easy and just made out of tissue paper, so super cheap!

We started a tradition with Kendall's birthdays of putting balloons above the bar in the kitchen. The girls love it and it adds lots of color!

I decided to start a tradition with Kendall where we get a children's book by the same author each year for the guests to sign at her birthday parties. We continued the tradition with Cooper, and decided on Eric Carle books for her.

This banner was a lot of fun to make! Erin helped me by cutting out the letters on her Cricut and mailing them to me. :) Thanks Nacho!

Ahhh!! The cake! We had a lady in town make it and she did such a great job! I gave her the outfit and the invitation and that was about all the direction I gave her. We loved what she came up with! And it tasted as good as it looked.

Bubble favors...I made labels for these and thought they turned out super cute!

Another first for me...water bottle labels. This was so easy and I loved how they turned out!

"C" wreath for the front door. Randy helped me with this and I loved it! Love the hot pink and zebra.

Outside...we put lots of baby pools, sprinklers, and slip-n-slides in the front yard for the kids to play in. I hung three more of the poms in front of the garage and we put the birthday sign out with more balloons. Isn't that the cutest little house?? I just love our house. :)

Wow....that's a lot of pictures. :) Check back soon for more pictures of the actual party!