Grace turns ONE!

Since Grace and Grandma share a birthday, I invited my mom to come down for the weekend of their birthdays. She happily accepted! The Weavers ended up coming too to join in the festivities so we had a nice little group together for the birthday girls. Grace was unfortunately not feeling very well on her birthday, so she wasn't quite her usual self, but she still had a pretty good time. She gobbled up her cake (much more so than any of our other kids!) and enjoyed opening her presents, with the help of her siblings and cousins. 😊

Here are some things Grace is doing at this big old age of ONE:

• Signing - she does "more" and "all done" and "eat". Not all the time, but she does it sometimes (when she wants to) very clearly
• Jabbering - lots of sounds going on! It's so fun. She's even starting to say a few things that sound awfully close to real words - "all done", "night night", and "hi", to name a few. Maybe it's our imagination or coincidence, or maybe she's a genius. We'll go with that one. 😉
• Walking! Everywhere! She rarely crawls now. She loves to walk around like a big kid.
• Playing chase - she LOVES to be chased and giggles and tries to run away. It is the cutest!
• Nursing - she still loves to nurse and I'm having a hard time wanting to wean her, which is very unusual for me at this age. I'm usually so ready to be done! We'll get there eventually...
• SLEEPING - this is very exciting. She finally started sleeping through the night about a month ago and is STILL sleeping through the night! It's so great. She's kind of in between one and two naps, so we're trying to figure that out, but it's so worth it because SHE'S SLEEPING THROUGH THE NIGHT. (Did I mention that?)
• Peekaboo! This is another recent one. She learned what it means and now she's always putting her hands over her eyes waiting for us to say, "Where's Grace?" And then she quickly puts them down and giggles as we say "Peekaboo!" or "There she is!" It never gets old.
• Outside - Grace hasn't spent a whole lot of time exploring the outside world on her own, but when she gets the chance, she loves it! She gets so sad if all the kids but her go out and is in heaven when we go out too. She loves to go on the trampoline, play in the grass/leaves, walk around on the sidewalk, you name it. It should be a fun summer!

We sure love this little muffin! We've started to see little bits of drama emerging here and there which is always exciting (yikes!), so it will be fun to see her little self continue to develop. She is a lot of fun! And now for the picture overload...

 

 Amy and the kids came down Saturday because Rob and Seth had some other commitments, but then they showed up as a surprise Sunday afternoon! It was very fun!