Happy First Birthday Mia!!!

Mia's one!!! Wait, what?! How is that possible?? It's so hard for me to believe that an entire year has gone by since this spunky little lady joined our family. And it's impossible for me to imagine life without her. She's got an incredibly strong will and is extremely effective at communicating what she wants without actually speaking. Let's just say she gets her point across multiple times a day. She's great at telling me "no." Every time I'm holding her and tell her that I need to set her down for just a second she immediately shakes her head and holds me tighter. She likes to spoon feed herself, and will shake her head at us if she's done with a particular food and wants something different. She makes her sisters laugh when she puts food in her hair. She puts headbands around her neck and likes to wear necklaces. She gets passed around at church like crazy. Everyone wants to hold her. I love earning giggles from her. It's one of my favorite sounds. So feminine and catching. Makes me giggle right along with her. I've found her standing at a barstool just giggling to herself. Also, she loves books. She'll flip through them, hold them and listen to them as we read to her. She doesn't like me smoothing out her hair and getting it out of her face at night as I'm rocking her to sleep. She messes it up if I try. She also has serious FOMO. She fights me daily when it comes to nap time. If she can hear her sisters I have absolutely no chance of succeeding in getting her to sleep. She needs to be in on whatever action is going on. She's recently discovered our toy room above the garage. It's a little bit of heaven for her and she often darts for it if ever given the chance. When the girls are getting in pajamas in the evenings and she's dressed she'll head for the room. I've found her crawling up the stairs multiple times before realizing the gate isn't up and it's suddenly too quiet. She's actually really good at climbing the stairs, but memories of Soph tumbling down them keeps me on top of her. She's not walking on her own yet, but loves to walk along furniture and around the house pushing her little walker. She's great at standing up on her own and I'm sure it won't be long before she's running after her sisters.

This girl loves her blanket, her sisters more than just about anything, Gatorade bottles, garden strawberries and ChapStick. Which, incidentally, she is officially banned from. This beautiful little girl loves holding on to big girl things. She seems to need to hold on to something. Always. Things like ChapStick, lip gloss, markers, spoons, etc. Well, we were taking a drive the other day and Mia had a ChapStick in each hand when we started off. When we made it to our destination she was covered in blue, gooey ChapStick. As were her clothes and her favorite blanket. BLUE EVERYWHERE!!! Also, the ChapStick lid was in her mouth. I panicked and decided she was going to choke on it before we could get it out of her mouth. Fortunately that didn't happen, but since then it's been a real struggle to keep her from her beloved ChapStick. But a battle I'm determined to win.

This picture of her was one that I took for Father's Day. I LOVE it. I think she looks so cute and grown up. And I owe Aunt Sarah a big thank you for editing it for me and getting it back to me so quickly.

We've all been really excited to celebrate Mia's big day. Jon made her awesome bear cake (which, incredibly, we didn't get an isolated pic of) and we talked about what she might like to get as a gift and what color balloons would be best. Unfortunately she got pretty sick in the three or four days leading up to her birthday. She was burning up with fever, her birthday included, which finally broke but left her with a pretty intense rash. We found out the day after her birthday that she had a viral infection when we went in for her 12 month checkup. We also found out that she's in the 13th percentile in length, and the 1 percentile in weight. The doctor said she looks great! Healthy (he's not worried about her) but her assignment is to eat more. It was nice to find out what was going on with her fever, but such a bummer that she was sick on her birthday. She was more subdued and clearly not comfortable.

Fortunately, she had the best gift opening assistants anyone could wish for.

And big sisters' skills didn't end at opening Mia's gifts. They offered to blow out her candle too. Mia really wasn't much into the evening's events. I would love to have seen her reactions when she was feeling well. It's so hard to see her sick. So lethargic and not herself.

She didn't much care about her cake.

Though we tried to entice her.

Grandma got her excited about her tea set though! For sure this gift is a win. The bright pink tea cup may prove problematic though, as it appears to be the favorite among the sisters.

We love this sweet little girl. She's already hit so many big milestones and we look forward to getting to know her even better and seeing what life with her brings. 

We waited until her sisters were asleep to "measure" her on her growth chart. She got to hold her "big girl" spoon and seemed to be feeling quite a bit better at that point. We love little miss Mia.