Clara's party Part 3

PRESENTS:

...ah the fun part, opening presents!

A gorilla that walks and makes gorilla sounds...

A doll from her cousins. Clara LOVES dolls and babies!

Books. I enjoy reading books to Clara because she is such a good audience. She's interested in all the pictures, and doesn't get impatient to turn the page. My older children love being read to as well, but they didn't when they were one.

Clara is especially funny with books that have flaps. I'll lift the flap to show her the picture underneath, and she quickly grabs it from my hand and smoothes it back down. She's very intent on keeping the book neat and keeping those pesky flaps CLOSED. =0)

An old-school chatter phone.

Hugging the scary gorilla.

All of the children had a great time at the birthday party, and we loved having Spencer and Roma's family there to celebrate with us! We're so grateful to have family close by, and we're even MORE LUCKY that it's Spencer and Roma, because they are awesome!!

Clara's party Part 2

EATING:

We had kabobs for Clara's birthday dinner. She was a fan.

The stick was her favorite part.

Her eyes haven't changed color yet. They are still the blue-ish color from birth, but soon they'll turn hazel, like the other two children.

That is if we don't give her sharp sticks to poke them with....

Raise your hand if you're sitting on the boy side...

....and now the girl side

How old is Clara?

There's a wall behind me so I couldn't back up far enough to get all the heads. Oops!

Clara's cake is a pumpkin ginger cake with cream cheese frosting, and marshmallow fondant accents. Clara surveys the cake with stoic approval.

Russ says Clara actually blew out the candle, but I'm not sure, I see a little bit of help coming from her brother!

I love how hesitant she is at first. As though she isn't quite sure what's expected of her now. She's had cake and treats plenty of times I'm afraid, but never have we made such a big deal out of it. I think that made her cautious.

Poking at it...

First bite...

....considering it...

...and apparently it's satisfactory.

Now it's bath time!

Clara's party Part 1

PLAYING

We celebrated Clara's first birthday a couple weeks early, because Russell was going to be out of town on her actual birthday. I took a lot of pictures so I'll divide it up into three parts. The first part is playing. We had our cousins Spencer and Roma over to celebrate with us. Our children LOVE playing with theirs!

They played on the swing set in the back yard...

Hyrum and Brendon riding around in the Fire truck.

Those are some good looking boys!!

Brielle and Cassandra caught things. Mostly bugs.

The kids ran through the sprinklers, and played in the kiddie pool. Here we have only Clara in the pool for the first while so she can enjoy it, before the pool became a jumping/splashing/diving area for the bigger kids.

Clara's first time in a swimsuit. Sad I know! My other kids had been in pools and hot tubs by 4 months or earlier, but the third child misses out on a lot. She's been in the ocean, and wading in lakes, but never in a swimsuit, and never has she been in an actual swimming pool.

We'll have to remedy that soon though, since the girl loves water!

Three pretty girls!

Clara at 11 months

Clara is such a darling baby! She's very happy and easy going. Her favorite things right now are shoes, jewelry, and dogs. Her shoe fetish occasionally gets us into trouble.

She'll crawl around Relief Society chasing down the prettiest shoes. When she finds a pair she likes she'll sit down and touch the shoe gently, then she'll use both hands and try to carefully pry the shoe off. If it doesn't work she'll pat the woman's leg, and look up into her face and smile, then pull gently again. If she manages to get a shoe she snatches it quickly and attempts to drag it back to where I'm sitting.

Once when I had both my older kids in swim lessons, I got the children showered and changed into clothes and then we headed for our car. We were all the way to the van before I noticed that Clara in her stroller had swiped a "Tom" shoe off of the bench in the locker room. I rushed it back in to find a swimming teacher frantically looking for her other shoe!

And she absolutely LOVES when I put fancy shoes on her. She has a pair of red sparkly shoes, and she's so proud of them! I have to be careful not to let her see them on days they won't match her outfit, because when she sees them she MUST wear them!

Power Outage

One day a car hit the power pole by our house. It caused a tremendous flash of electricity.

Hyrum thought it was the best thing ever. Firemen and policemen EVERYWHERE. The fire truck even parked in our driveway for awhile.

And the kids didn't seem to mind the day without electricity. We had all the flash-lights, headlamps and lanterns for that evening, and the kids thought it was better than camping!