McKinley's First birthday party

On August 27th, we threw McKinley's first birthday party! It was quite the bash! The theme of the party was, "Our Wild Child is turning ONE". So I went with animal print for all the decorations and McKinley's party outfit. We had the celebration at Pioneers Park, a beautiful park here in Lincoln! The weather turned out to be just perfect and made for a wonderful event!

These are the cakes that Travis used his artistic skills to create! If planning doesn't workout, I think he has a future in cake decorating :)


McKinley had lots of friends and family there to celebrate with! Here she is getting some love from her Meme...

Of course Pepe was there too...

And Grandma and Grandpa Hulse!

My cousins Becky and Misty also came up from Omaha (well Becky is actually from New Jersey, but she happened to be visiting her sister Misty in Omaha at the time, so that worked out great to get to see her and her 3 girls too!)



And we had the Oxford's and the McConnell's there as well!



McKinley was nice enough to pose for a small photo shoot I did in front of a beautiful tree at the park! I got some really cute pictures of her in her cute party attire!




Here she is ready for some dinner!


Mya took the opportunity to help feed McKinley her dinner! Mya loves feeding McKinley, she's such a great helper!


McKinley had fun opening her presents! She got some great stuff! She wanted to play with each thing and didn't know why she had to open another present and not play with the one she just opened!



And of course we had the traditional first birthday experice! McKinley had her own personal pink and black heart shaped cake!


At first she wasn't quite sure what to do with or think of the cake!


She thought it was fun smearing it on her chest!



Then she realized, hey this stuff is actually pretty good and really started to enjoy herself!

I think she had a good time, what do you think?


We had a wonderful time celebrating McKinley turning one! We're so grateful to all of our family and friends who were able to come and celebrate with us and for the wonderful presents you spoiled McKinley with! We had a wonderful day celebrating a wonderful milestone in our family! I'm going to leave you with one of my favorite pictures of my sweet little girl from the party! I love my little one year old!

McKinley is ONE!

I'm almost a month late posting this, it's been a really busy September! So expect a lot of posts, because there's been a lot to post about! McKinley turned one on August 24th! To celebrate we got her some new toys, a walker and a ball, some news shoes and took her out to dinner! We even got her her own grilled cheese, the first time we ordered her own food for her at a restaurant. We also shared our milk shake with her and she loved that :)

The next day we met up with Emily, Mya and Madison at the childrens museum. McKinley loves playing with Mya, especially at the childrens museum where there are lots of neat things to play with!

A few days later we took her to the doctor for her one year old checkup. Her stats are:
Height- 30in (77%)
Weight- 23lbs 13oz (86%)
Head- 19.5in (99%)

At one year old, McKinley is so happy and so much fun! Her little personality is starting to show and I love it! She is so smiley and giggly, and still loves smiling and waving when she sees people! She loves to laugh, especially when Travis or I start laughing, she will fake laugh along with us! It cracks me up, so it makes me laugh even more and then she keeps laughing more, it is so much fun!

She loves to point at things and will point at something when she wants it. The other night at dinner she did not want the corn I was giving her, so she pointed at my bread to let me know what she really wanted! She loves to drink, and is starting to really love milk! I give it to her in her sippy cup and she tilts her head back and guzzles it down!

She got a baby for her birthday, from Mya, and we named it baby Sue in honor of Mya's Baby Susie. McKinley loves her baby! She will snuggle her and pat her on the back, it is the cutest thing! She even says baby when she sees her sometimes! She can also say hi and mama. She loves to wave at people and say hi! She is so friendly and loves to say hi to everyone she sees! Hi was her first word!

She loves to climb up and down stairs! We cannot keep her off of them when they are anywhere in sight. She loves to climb on and off of the couch and our bed! That is one of her favorite past times during the day. She also loves kids and laughs and gets so happy when she sees them!

She loves to sleep with her love bug, her stuffed animal we've put in her crib with her since she was 6 months old. When she wakes up in the mornings and we go in to get her out of he crib, she is so happy to see us, but does not want to leave her love bug, so she reaches down to pick it up to take it with her!

She is quite the mischief maker and gets into everything! Here's proof...

She still loves books! She will still just sit there and flip through the pages of book after book. Recently she has started babbling while she flips through the pages like she is reading! It is so cute that she is trying to read!

She has 12 teeth now! In a matter of 2.5 months those 12 teeth have all come in. The poor girl has hardly got a break from teething. She even has all 4 of her one year molars in already!

We love our sweet little one year old, and we are so grateful for the sweet spirit she brings into our home! She makes us smile and laugh not just everyday, but at least every hour she is awake. And even sometimes while she is sleeping when we laugh about something she did through out the day, or look at a cute picture of her sweet little face! We are so grateful Heavenly Father sent her to us and entrusted us with her care! She is one of the greatest blessings in our lives and we can no longer imagine our lives without her!

McKinley's new 'do

I was playing around with McKinley's hair today and thought it might be long enough to put a pony tail in it. So we went to the store and got some tiny, elastic hair ties and tried it out! The only place on her head that there was enough hair to tie into a pony tail was on the top of her head. So we put the hair tie in there and voila, McKinley's first pony tail! It took her almost a year to get enough hair to put in a pony tail, I've been waiting for this day for a while now :) I'm excited for her to grow some more hair so I can test out more fun hairstyles on my cute baby girl!

11 months old!

1 more month until my sweet little McKinley is 1 year old! I've been having fun making things and planning for her first birthday party! I can't believe it's almost been a year since our baby girl joined our family! What a year it's been... I'll save that post for next month :) I'll just give an update on what our little 11 month old is up to these days:

• She's still crawling around, still getting into EVERYTHING!

• Now even more so, because she's taken to climbing. She can climb over things that are fairly tall, and loves to climb up stairs! Here's a video of her climbing the stairs at the park to go down the slide, don't worry I slid down the slide with her :)

• She can stand on her own for a few seconds and then she'll fall. Falling doesn't seem to bother her though, she'll fall and then just stand right up and tries it again!

• She still loves to sit and flip through the pages of books! It's one of her favorite past times, I'm hoping this will mean she'll be a reader! She's also started gnawing on her cardboard books, so they now look like we have a mouse living in our house instead of an 11 month old!

• She still loves getting out and seeing people and places! Her favorite time of the day is when we get out of the house and are out and about! She smiles, talks to and waves at everyone we see and loves looking and seeing new things all around her! Here she is swimming and trying out the carousel at the mall for the first time!
  

We sure love our little girl a ton! She's so much fun, and makes us laugh numerous times everyday with her silly faces and funny mannerisms! We love that she knows us and gets so excited to see us after we've been gone for a little while! We're glad she loves us, because we sure love her a ton!

County Fair

This weekend we were able to go to the Lancaster County fair with Travis's sister Rachael and her family, who were in town for the weekend, along with Brad and Emily. We had fun walking around and seeing all the animals! There were horses, cows, zebras, chicks, ducks, roosters... you name it! McKinley wasn't too sure of all the animals and clung pretty tightly to me when we got close to one! Here she is with the zebra, in her zebra outfit!




We even let McKinley try out a 4-wheeler at the fair...


McKinley had a fun time visiting with her cousins Sabrina, Janette, Prescott and Cora from Illinois! She loves kids and had fun playing with them and having so much attention, which she loves :) Here is a video of her playing a game with Prescott and laughing so much! It's really cute, she would push his feet off the couch, then he'd fall down and she'd just laugh and laugh. They played this game for a while and she'd laugh everytime! Then she played it with me for a while and just kept laughing and laughing! It was so cute!!