Birthday celebrations!

Anna Claire is turning 1 on September 5.  I think back over the past year, and it has been quite a year!  It's definitely been a year full of ups and downs, blessings, and changes!  But, we truly have a lot to celebrate with this sweet girl.  I have spent the past several weeks planning and creating her birthday party.  We were so excited to celebrate, and we had a great time celebrating her this morning.  We had our family and closest friends over and I had ball pit, bubble maker, and sprinkler for the kiddos to run around and play.  The sprinkler wasn't planned, but this weekend just happened to be the hottest of the summer, so you do what you have to do right.  We ended up buying a canopy tent though, and didn't have to turn on the sprinkler. 

Amelia found the sprinkles that fell on the counter after decorating the cookies.  She decided to sneak a few handfuls.

The yummy cupcakes.  They were quite fantastic!

Anna Claire's present.  She loves these chairs, she had claimed Amelia's so now Amelia will get hers back.  The only problem with this one is that her name is too long for the monogram, so I decided to just do initials.  They only capitalized the A, so it says Ace.  I guess that will be her nickname.  Also, I had a cute birthday outfit planned for her, but since we were planning on turning on the sprinkler, I really didn't want to change her a bunch of times, so she just wore her bathing suit.

The ball pit.  The kids really liked it, and my nephew loved it.

The food table.  We had bbq slider sandwiches, mac n cheese, cheese and crackers, fruit salsa and cinnamon tortilla chips, lofthouse sugar cookies, and cupcakes.

The birthday girl finally gets to try cake.  I had high hopes of her and her smash cake.  There was no smashing of this smash cake.  I think she was distracted by all the attention.  she loves to clap, so she just kept smiling and clapping.  It was really cute, but I was disappointed that she did not dive in to the cake.

We took her hand and smashed it in the cake ourselves and she finally ate some. 

We had a great time with our family and friends.  We look forward to many more birthdays with this sweet girl!