Elias Celebrates One Year

And boy did we celebrate! (Beware, I'm about to totally clog your lines with the amount of pictures I'm putting on here. Sorry. I should probably just post on one of those photo sites. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Who has time for that?)

Here's some pre-party gossip. At midnight the night before we are supposed to throw this huge (ok, semi-huge; like 40-45 guests) shindig, while Michael was working on the "first year of Elias" video, we noticed that there was an excessive heat warning for the area from 12-6pm Saturday. The party, which we were hosting outside in our yard because our apartment is like 400 square feet, was scheduled for 2-5pm, Saturday. Smack in the middle of the excessive heat warning. Michael and I spent an hour trying to decide if we should cancel the event and reschedule when it might be, frankly, less dangerous to hang out outside. But we threw hesitation to the wind and chose to brave the day by taking our bed down and shoving it into the foyer, putting our under-the-bed drawers in the bathtub, cranking the single AC window unit and opening up the house for people to escape from the brutal sun and humidity. We also filled the wading pool in the shade outside for anyone who wanted to take a very little dunk in ice cold water. And we decided we would understand if no one came.

But people came. And the heat wasn't awful. And Elias loved it.

Elias' cake theme was musical instruments. His cake was a drum and the pan of brownies has a kazoo drawn on it-- he is a prodigy on the kazoo.

You can see from the pictures that he didn't really enjoy his cake....

And he certainly didn't bother looking for more under the plate, or on the ground all around him.

There were only a few children at Kindred's first bday party. But people are catching up to us in the family way. We had 12 children at Elias' party, aging from 5 months to 8 years. Here's my father, wowing many of them as he often does with his famous invisible-ball-toss-into-the-paper-bag trick.

I had to include this picture because it might the funniest shot I have of my friend Lara.

The party hats were a big hit. Elias worked on his for a while trying to get it in the right spot.

This is Elias' youngest cousin Brody. He was visiting from Florida with his parents and we were thrilled they joined us. (His brother Caden moves so fast that he's a blur in most of my pictures so you won't see him in this series.)

Some of our cherished guests

Michael looking at brother-in-law Darren as if to say, Dude, my kid just drooled on that cookie you are about to eat.

And finally here is Elias, sad to see it all end. (I did dress him in the morning. But looking back on these pictures is appears as though he was perfectly comfortable showing a little (most of) his flesh. The child has no couth. But golly, he's awful cute.)

Happy happy birthday birthday!