Ada's Birthday & Father's Day

My girl turned one year old yesterday. I must have pinched myself a million times over the past 72 hours cause I just can't believe it's been a year. A whole beautiful, magical year of Ada. I'm not enough of a wordsmith to make the magnitude of this past year make sense. By all other measures it has been a rocky time but this little girl saved me for sure. I would have become completely insane without her to keep me grounded.

So I threw her a little party. I made the invitations myself, I enlisted help to make strings of flags, and I baked 10 cakes before deciding one was good enough to be her birthday cake. It seems silly, even to me, but this party was extremely important to me. It felt a bit like giving the bird to the bad parts of the past year and saying,  

"Look!! The good triumphed!!"

The preparations:





Pre-party lovin':








Visits with new friends:






Presents!!












And, of course, CAKE!!!














Strangely and sadly I have no "good" pictures of Ada with her grandparents or Uncle Colin. She moves too fast or our camera sucks too bad, doesn't matter - the pictures are all too blurry because she was so excited and moving so much. I'm not much of a photographer and truth be told, I often forget to reach for the camera. I hope these will put together the story for her when she's older. I looked like this after the last guest left and she was napping:

Happiest, happiest birthday, my heart. Love you so. 

FATHER'S DAY

I always say that my man is a good egg. And he is.

I hear stories from women whose husbands won't stay with the baby or the woman is too afraid to leave them alone. Not my man. He is all Daddy, all day, every Sunday. Today he celebrated Father's Day alone with Ada - they went and did a very father/daughter activity: bought diapers and formula. It doesn't get much more authentic than that. Then he came home and grilled out for us on his new Weber.

With Tim it's something more than being a great team player with Mommy: I love the way he loves our daughter. He has a squeeky voice he uses only for her. He can snuggle her close to soothe her. He carries her as if she were feather-light. He talks to her, teaches her, cares for her...and she responds like a fish on a hook. I think she knows that she is completely safe with him. She adores him.






Today we said goodbye to Violetta. I will miss her so much. It as great to be with her again - I love my friend. My daughter loves my friend. And my V loves my A. In my estimation, my daughter's community of loving people could never, ever be too big. There is always room for one more. Is it possible to get too much love? I think not: