Birthday girl!!!

My how time has flown!!! We celebrated Spring's first birthday last week!

We let Spring open her presents in the afternoon so she'd have time to play with them before bed. Reed was pretty excited about the stroller that Grandma sent.

But eventually he let her play with it.

Reed was also good about helping her open the presents.

And happily, Reed let Spring open some on her own too!

Showing off her pearly whites after opening presents.

We spent the day together as a family and went out for dinner at our favorite local vegetarian restaurant. We got a wonderful surprise there when we discovered that there would be live music that evening. The music was a little hard to describe, trance-like and peaceful, but energetic at times too. The artist (Christopher of the Wolves) played various instruments simultaneously including didgeridoo, a type of steel drum call a hang (pronounced han), drum, bells, ectar (one string guitar) and a type of Chinese flute. The artist was really nice and explained to Reed what he was going to do while playing in case Reed got scared (though once he got going there was nothing scarey at all). Reed and Spring sat wide-eyed enthralled for the first few songs. Eventually, the newness of the music wore off and they started dancing to the music. After we finished dinner, I sat Spring on the floor so she could dance there while I cleaned up the sweet potato fries she'd strewn everywhere. She danced so vigorously that the musician joked that he thought she was going to start turning cartwheels!

After dinner, we came home and had cake. Spring wasn't super excited about the cake, perhaps because she had gorged herself on hummus and sweet potato fries at dinner, but we still got a good cake picture!

Then last night, we had my family over for dinner for a birthday celebration. Since we had already had a cake, I decided to make an apple pie. Spring seemed to prefer the apple pie over the cake, and I am reminded that for several birthdays, I requested an apple pie in lieu of a birthday cake!

Are you people seriously going to let that pie burn?

Yum! (For some reason, all the pie-eating pictures were a little fuzzy.)

The sticky aftermath.