Asher Turned One!

Good morning birthday boy!

I cannot even begin to say how much I love this little boy. His first year has been full of love and smiles and he's got such a fun personality that I know there's more love and smiles in the years to come!
The day after his birthday Asher decided to grow up; he got up on his hands and knees and started rocking! (See, that's funny because some babies are walking by the time they are one, and my baby doesn't even crawl!! Ha ha ha...we still love him.) He's really good at the army crawl and he gets around real quick. A few days after his birthday my dad was babysitting and he said Asher had pulled up to a toy and let go and stood there for a second or two! He's never done that before--and he hasn't done it since so maybe my dad made it up :) And he also started pulling up in his crib when he wakes up. Funny how so much happened in that first week after his birthday!

Asher has 8 beautiful teeth (that I still think are big!). With those 8 beautiful teeth he still eats baby food but I've been trying to give him more grown up food. I think the only thing he's spit out is broccoli (who can blame him, really) but it wasn't cooked or softened. He loves cheese and yogurt. I'm hoping he'll be a good eater like his brother.

I really need to start feeding him more grown up food, I guess, because at his one year check up he weighed 18.9 lbs (3%) and he was 28.1 inches (6%). Of course his head is at 81% so at least his brain is growing nice and big :)
Asher loves to pull everything out of drawers and cupboards. In fact, I think most of the time he'd prefer to play in a drawer than with a toy. My bathroom and kitchen are (more) unorganized now because I've lost the will to put back everything just exactly where it belongs. Knowing it's gonna be pulled out again in about ten more minutes, I just try to get it out of the way. Rylan, being the good big brother that he is, was very concerned about the glass bowls in Asher's favorite kitchen cupboard. So we moved those out of Asher's reach, as well as cast iron skillets, blenders, and anything else that could cause more harm than a cool whip bowl.
Rylan's train is also a big hit with Asher. Especially when Rylan is playing with it. One day they'll be able to play together with the same intent. But for now Rylan likes to push his trains around the tracks and Asher likes to pull the tracks apart. Bad combination. But Asher sure does have fun being the destroyer, which we allow him to do every once in awhile!
For his birthday my sister Deborah came and took his pictures. We took some outside and then did a cake smashing session which was slow. Really, how could he know what to do? We just expect him to go at it and bathe in the cake which isn't exactly how it went. We'd show him by sticking our finger in his cake and licking our finger and he would do the same...just barely touching the cake. Rylan kept asking if he could show Asher how to do it because he wanted more of that cake! It was so nice of Deborah to come do it though and I'm excited to see how the pictures turned out. Don't get me wrong; he did end up eating too much cake and was messy enough for a bath.

I absolutely love birthdays and I think everyone should have a big fun birthday every year. But for some reason when it comes down to it I don't plan things for my boys' birthdays. I know a big reason is I don't want to inconvenience anyone by coming to a birthday party for a one year old who doesn't even care. So we just invited people over for cake and ice cream. And then guess what...I didn't even make a cake! Yeah, that's how lame I am. BUT, I did make some brownies and we had some ice cream. My parents came and gave Asher a little farm set, Amy came with her girls (Charlie was working on their house) and Tami came with her fam. They gave Asher a see and say and some tennis balls. They also brought him some balloons earlier in the day (and Deborah brought balloons, too!). I am always happy to have balloons around the house. Deborah's balloons were accidentally let go outside (and Ry still talks about it. It was sad but a little exciting for him). The balloons Tami brought are still floating around our house (a week and a half later) and it's so fun! I love walking in the house and seeing balloons! There are lots of games to play with balloons so we've all been having fun.

Happy Birthday my Asher love!