Benchichs Abroad! Our Arabian Adventure: Catherine's First Birthday

Our sweet baby girl is one! Talk about the fastest year ever.

"Check out my smocked birthday dress!"

Her big milestones so far are talking (she says "cat", "up", "mama", "dada", "doll" and "more") and crawling REALLY fast. In fact, she crawls so fast that she has little interest in learning to walk. She eats grownup food, drinks from a straw cup, and has seven teeth (wow). She loves her big brothers and Graycie dearly. Of her toys, she likes her dolly the best. She can't stand to be put in the pack n play anymore, but she still likes to be rocked to sleep with a bottle, and she takes two solid naps a day. She has been a happy and contented baby, not demanding much and tolerating most everything well. She slept through the night at about two months and has never gone back. Thank you, Sissy, for being so easy!

To celebrate her birth, we had a medium-sized party for her at our house before the big day, and then we did present opening on her actual birthday, which was also Easter this year. (That won't happen again until she is 12, and then it will happen two more times in her lifetime, once when she is in her 70s and again in her 80s.)

Here she is!

I like this picture because I think she looks like me when I was a baby. All the kids look so much like Mike that it is nice to get a flash of myself every now and then. My mom says that she has my hair from when I was a baby.

Lots of family friends were there....

and everyone seemed to have a great time!

For all the kids' first birthdays, I have had the cake made by somebody else. I ordered this cake from a lady on camp who bakes. I think she did a beautiful job! The only option was fondant, though, so Catherine did not get a chance to dig her hands into the cake.