Aidan's First Birthday

Before I begin boring you to death with details of Aidan's first birthday, I thought it was worth mentioning that this is my 250th post on this blog.  What?!  Holy cow, it's true!  I can't believe I've posted that many times and I can't believe you poor suckers keep coming back to read this drivel!  Ha, ha, ha.  I truly appreciate each and every one of you - I hope you know that.

Now, on to last Sunday - my baby boy's very first birthday.  Talk about a surreal experience.  That morning, while setting up for the party, I found myself going through the motions, still in sheer bewilderment.  I don't think it really sank in until people started showing up.

Here's the table all set up before anyone arrived (the two yellow-wrapped gifts are from us; the blue one is from a friend who wasn't at the party).  I'm still so proud of us for not going overboard on gifts for him!  I'm so glad we didn't, too, because he got spoooo-oooo-oooiiiled!!  What a lucky boy!

Here's Aidan's cake, the "baby block" the bakery made to go with the big cake.  It was really cute and I love that they put the number one on it.  I didn't love that they put plastic balloons all over it (why not use candy ones or draw them with icing?!)... but that was easy enough to fix.

The big cake.  I worked very hard to find this!  I never imagined it would be so difficult to find a Mickey Mouse cake design in this town.  Just crazy.  Had we wanted Cars, or Disney Princesses, we would've been set.  But poor ol' Mickey is apparently being left out in the cold.

First glimpse of his cake.  You can tell he's a little mesmerized by the candle. Not sure he'd ever seen flame before this.

I was expecting him to go completely wild and attack this cake like Amy Winehouse on a meth pipe (...too soon?) but he was actually very controlled.

I love this picture.  "Huh?"

"YUMMMMM!"  He finally started really getting into it.  When all was said and done, he had frosting in his hair, in his ears, and of course all over his body.  And he was all sugared up, but MAN did he have a good time!  I had to fight tears throughout this part of the celebration, because I felt so very fortunate to be standing beside my kid while he ate his first birthday cake.  So awesome.

Playing with some of his new toys!  Before you say anything, yes, I know the binky is upside down.  I did fix it after I took the picture.  I'm a little neurotic about that... heh.  I already have a feeling he'll need braces, no sense in making the situation worse!  Actually, he doesn't usually care about the binky at all, which is good.  He usually only wants it if he's tired.  Which he was, in this picture.  He skipped his afternoon nap completely (thank you sugar!) so by about 5pm he was running completely on fumes.

It was an exhausting - and an incredibly wonderful - day.  Three different people said to me that day, "whew, just wait til Christmas!"  Ha!

I texted Aidan's birthmom first thing in the morning on his birthday and I told her I was thinking of her and that we all love her.  I thanked her for giving Aidan life so that we could make all of these incredible memories with him.  She responded kindly - as always - and said she was thinking of us too.  And she said something that left me with tears once again.  "Thank you for giving him a loving home, he is truly blessed."  That is validation the likes of which I have never felt before.

I've said it before, I'm saying it again.  Open adoption is really amazing when everyone does their part.

Okay, I'm finally off to bed.  I'm not getting nearly enough sleep lately due to hiccups in someone's sleep schedule.  Must be all that excitement from being a big, bad one-year old!