Birthday Princess!!

Today our precious Grace Elizabeth turns 1!! I can't believe one year ago I was in the hospital holding this sweet newborn baby trying to figure out how to take care of her! She is truly the JOY of our lives. I did not know I could love someone as much as I love my baby girl. Watching Ryan interact with her makes me fall in love with him more and more every day. He is truly an AMAZING daddy!

She is constantly on the move! I am fairly certain she would win a crawling contest if I entered her. The most steps she has taken is 4, so she is very close to really taking off. She has a total of 6 teeth and teeth 7 & 8 will be popping through any day now. She is still a skinny mini I weighed her today and she weighed 15 pound 10 ounces (below 5 percentile) and was 28 inches long (between 10-20 percentile). We will get the official measurements are her one year check-up on Monday. She is talking up a storm. Her first word was "Hi!" the first time she said it in the right context was on vacation with my family to Josiah, her 6-month-old cousin. She also says "dada" (ALLLLL the time!), "bye", "momma" (very rarely) and today she said "bow" (probably because she has heard that word and worn one since the day she was born!). She does a lot of other "talking and story-telling". The chick is never quiet, if she's quiet she's doing something she isn't suppose to! She also has the concept of no. We just firmly say "Grace" and give her a look and she shakes her head and will usually stop what she's doing. The best is when she crawls away really fast and acts like she wasn't ever doing it! She brings so much laughter and happiness to our lives!

I am also quite proud of the fact the she has never had one sip of formula. I started out with the goal of breastfeeding for 6 months, once I realized how much easier it was than dealing with a bottle and the health benefits there was no doubt in my mind to continue to breastfeed. I think it is truly amazing that God created my body to provide nutrition to my sweet child! We serve an amazing God!

Above are a couple pictures of her birthday breakfast with mommy and daddy. Ryan had to go to New York today for work so we spent the morning together celebrating our birthday princess. My incredible mom and I have spent the afternoon getting ready for the "Enchanted Garden" birthday party on Saturday. Since it is almost midnight I am going to bed, Ryan's mom and step-dad will get in around 2 pm tomorrow. They are going to watch Grace while I run some last minute errands for the big bash on Saturday. I will try to post pictures of the party this weekend. I also need to do a post about our vacation, I have been so busy the last month I forgot! Hopefully, next week...
Thank you to everyone who has helped us, encouraged us, loved us and been for us this past year!

Love ~

Momma L