First Birthday

I've had 9 years experience planning birthday parties - oh wait; make that 5 years. We didn't have big birthday parties for the boys until they turned 4. Oh sure, we celebrated their birthdays' - we just didn't have a party. In fact, we celebrated their 2nd and 3rd birthdays while on vacations - so no need to plan a party.

Even though we didn't have a BIG 1st birthday party for the boys - we had a lot of people with us to celebrate. Present at their party were Steve's parents, his brother Gary, his other brother Dave and Dave's wife Linda. They all traveled to our house (and stayed at our house) to help us celebrate.

Since it was just a family celebration - we kept the rest of the party low-key also. I tried my hand at cake decorating and a made a very cute (if I do say so myself) Train cake (using skills I learned watching my mom decorate cakes.)

I've been to other 1st birthday parties where the kids are given a piece of cake and let loose. You know the scenario: big piece of cake, small child, hands into cake, cake all over face. Did we do this? NO! We fed the boys small pieces of cake and had no mess. I was sort of looking forward to hte big messy face - but I was not looking forward to hte cleaning up of two very messy boys (we had enough of that all the time anyway).

I went shopping for presents for the boys - what do you get for a 1 year old? I decided they needed toys that would help them develop their hand/eye coordination. So, they got toys that required them to be able to put the correct shape in the correct hole (turns out they were not old enough to do this yet).

The biggest thing we did at their party was to reflect on how our lives had changed over the last year. The biggest change was, of course, becoming parents. Next biggest change - moving across the country. We found, through our reflecting, that we probably wouldn't have changed anything we did that first year (thinking back now there are some things I would do differently). We found that as new parents, we were doing pretty well. Our children were happy and healthy and growing as they should. We did end up being different parents than we thought we would be; we were much more casual than we had imagined (and we still are). Pretty much, we discovered that we really liked being parents; we had 2 really great kids and we looked forward to the years to come.

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