Happy Birthday, Eddy!

Happy Birthday to my dearest. She's one today.

ONE YEAR OLD.

I can't believe it's been a year already. It simultaneously was the longest yet quickest year of my life.

It's been hard, at times, I'll admit to that. But those hard times are far far far outweighed by how awesome this little human is becoming. Shawn and I will look at her and then look at each other, then look at her again and just shake our heads. How is it that we created something a gajillion times cooler than us combined? Nature. It's a crazy thing.

As with all first birthday parties, it was a combined celebration of her greatness as well as a "hooray, we didn't fail as parents" party for the two of us. As with all celebrations in our family, we had tons of food and a delicious cake made by my pa. Eddy had fun with her friends, we had fun with ours, and it was a good time.

The only hiccup was when Eddy decided to get ambitious and eat an entire strawberry before I could stop her and nearly choked on it. She recovered quickly when she discovered that there was a whole cake hidden underneath that strawberry.

Oh, watching her discover the magic of cake. It was the highlight of the party. See below.

"You all sing weird." 

At first a little shy... 

Best way to eat cake: by the fistful.

"Soooo gooood!"

That sprinkle was on her forehead the whole time.

Holy cuteness.

Precake: Playin' piano with friend Truman.

Happy birthday, my sweetness. Here's to so many more. (But there really is no rush.)

Sleep Sack #2: Winter Edition

This girl is growing. She is still petite, and people are never shy to point that out, but she's growing nonetheless.

She's growing because she's sleeping. Quite a bit, this happy mommy might add.

As is recommended by 'experts,' Eddy's been sleeping in a sleep sack since we stopped swaddling her. Now that she's a year old, we can safely change her bedding to a blanket, but her sleeping patterns make that a non-possibility.

This girl cannot sleep still. Every time we look at her in the monitor, she's facing a different way. She has no sense of which direction is up, which results in blankets being pretty much useless.

So it was time to make another sleep sack for our girl who has already grown out of two others.

Sewing time!

I started with fleece I had leftover from her stegosaurus costume. I didn't have a pattern, but I used another sleep sack as a stencil for the pieces.

I also wanted to use all the materials I had on hand, so I had to come up with a design that used velcro instead of a zipper. So I decided that this would be put on like a sweatshirt, over the head. (I know for a fact that there are many babies out there who would not be into the whole sleep sack over the head deal, but I knew Eddy wouldn't mind.)

Step 1: Cut out pieces.

Step2: Sew pieces together.

Step 3: Embellish with fun things like owls that you cut out of other leftover flannel.

Step 4: Decide that your sewing machine skills aren't good enough to finish the arm and neck holes so do them by hand and create a fun cross stitch pattern.

Step 5: Sew in velcro at the bottom.

Step 6: Take pictures of the super totes adorbs model wearing the garment.

This has a good six inches at the bottom so I'm hoping that she'll sleep in this until she's ready for a bigger kid bed with blankets and pillows and stuff. Plus I have the other sleep sack I made for the summer months that is also extra long.

Here's to keeping my crazy little lady warm at night.