Claire at One Year

Oh, Clairy. One year old already! Time for a big milestones report...

The Stats
Claire was 28.5 inches long/tall at her one year appointment on Wednesday, and 21 lbs, 13 oz. So, in her first year, she grew eight inches and about tripled her body weight.

She's "true to size" in clothes, so she's just now starting to wear some 12-18 month clothes, though most 6-12 month still fit and the 12-18 month pants are pretty long. She's going to be a little more petite in height, I think. She wears a size 2 shoe and size 3 diaper.

Milestones
She took her first steps on October 8, at 11 months and 1 week old, and by her first birthday could walk halfway across the room, but (as someone on Facebook, can't remember who, said of their baby) walking "is more a party trick than a mode of transportation." That changed in the last week, and she's been choosing to walk longer distances now. She can also climb steps (on all fours) and now we have to keep a gate across the bottom of the staircase too. She disappeared from the playroom yesterday and we found her up in my craft room, getting supplies out of the cabinet!

Claire has five teeth now. After getting her bottom front two and top front two, her first incisor (the bottom right one) started coming through a few weeks ago. She takes a couple naps at school, one on the weekends, and sleeps about 10-11 hours at night, still waking at least once. (Usually, it's just 4:30, then she'll go back to sleep until about 6.)

She can say "dada," "kitty," and "Kate," so I'm the only one in the house who needs no introduction (we'll frame it that way!) She points to me if someone asks about Mommy, though, and she could identify herself in a picture this morning. I think she also said "balloon" today, when playing with the balloon Kate got at a birthday party yesterday.

She started drinking cow's milk at school this past week and is more or less self-weaning. I decided I would stop pumping at the one year mark and continue to nurse her morning, night, and weekends as long as the milk held out. (Kate, you'll recall, didn't nurse, but I pumped for her for a year and the massive frozen stash lasted until she was 16 months.) I didn't have such an overabundance with Claire, so our frozen stash was never more than ten bags or so, and was gone before the one year mark. Though she always needed to be nursed to sleep, she started getting more independent in that department a few weeks ago, nursing just a little and then going down awake (yay!) so she doesn't nurse too much anymore (boo). I'll be curious to see how long a tail my supply will have, since she nurses at most four times a day, and not much each time.

Stuff Claire Likes
Claire likes to watch and learn to do what Big Sister is doing, so she can color with a crayon and make noble efforts at doing jigsaw puzzles and playing Chutes and Ladders. I'm hoping this desire to imitate will extend to potty training! Kate sometimes struggles to share toys, but generally they play pretty nicely together.

Claire also likes to hug and cuddle. Her favorite "game," I might say, is standing over you while you're laying on the ground and just doing a freefall onto your face. She'll laugh and laugh. I love how kids just trust that you will always catch them.

Claire still loves to eat. She was a voracious nurser from the start, started eating table food not too long after we started pureed solids, and will eat just about anything. She enjoyed her first ice cream the night of her birthday (a family tradition we've developed, since both girls' first birthdays were on weekdays and we wanted something fun for that day, before the party the following weekend). She had pumpkin pie ice cream from Baskin-Robbins.

I'd be hard pressed to say what her favorite foods are, since she really will eat most anything put in front of her. She even wanted to try deep fried oreos when Matt got some at a festival a few weeks ago! She'll clamor for it, too. Don't get between this girl and her food!

Personality
Popi kept saying her middle name should be "Mellow." She really does just go with the flow most of the time. She'll have her toddler-esque moments when she dramatically puts her forehead to the ground or wall and cries (usually when we take something away from her or make her get out of the fridge so we can close the door) but she is a very sweet, accepting child. When I was expecting her, people said how she would have to be a pistol to keep up with Kate, but I willed her to be more calm and quiet, not just for my own sanity, but for her sake as well. Two strong winds collide to make a tornado, but a flexible tree can stand her ground with the wind, standing strong without being broken.

A Few More Sweet Photos
'Nough said. Look at this sweet little cutie!

Pretty with pumpkins.

With Mommy on her first birthday (Nov. 1)

Clapping along with the bluegrass music at the Music and Molasses Festival.

Matchy-matchy playing with sister.

Rainbow hairbow

Wanting Daddy to lift her, Dirty Dancing style, like he was doing to Kate.

Babies and Kids for Obama!

That's my girl! On to toddlerhood!

Rainbow Cookies

I was really excited about the rainbow cookies I made for Claire's party. They were actually inspired by the candy corn cookies we made a few weeks ago—a layered sugar cookie sliced to reveal all the colors. The steps are pretty much the same, just more/different colors and a different slicing pattern.

Step 1: Mix up a sugar cookie dough. Here is the original recipe for the candy corn cookies I found on Kathie Cooks. It is lemon flavored and quite a nice texture.

Step 2: Divide dough evenly into separate bowls for each color, and dye to desired shade with food coloring.

Step 3: Press each layer firmly into a baking dish (might wish to line with parchment paper for easy removal) OR roll each layer out with a rolling pin and stack. I used the dish method for the candy corn ones, and found it was hard to make each layer even (see how bumpy my orange layer is in the picture above?) so I rolled each layer for the rainbow cookies. The edges are uneven, then, as you see below, but inside the "loaf," they are much more even.

Step 4: Wrap the layered "loaf" of dough (remove from baking dish, if you've used that method for assembling the layers) and place in fridge for at least two hours to firm. You can keep the dough for up to a week wrapped in the fridge, to make fresh cookies in several batches, like a homemade slice-and-bake roll. I did that with the candy corn ones. 

Step 5: Remove from fridge and slice into bars of about 1/4 inch thick. For the rainbow cookies, I sliced each strip in half to make bars about 3-4 inches long. For the candy corn cookies, angle your knife back and forth to make 6-7 triangles out of the long strip.

Step 6: Bake on lightly greased cookie sheet at 375 for about 10 minutes. Cookies will expand slightly. (I worried that I made the rainbow cookies too flat, resulting in too thin a bar, but the 1-inch wide bar expanded to about 1.25-1.5 inch after baking.)

Step 7: Add the finishing touch. Kathie's recipe calls for dusting the candy corn cookies in sugar (though they are quite tasty without it) and I added a frosting "cloud" to the end of my rainbow cookie bars.

Step 8: Serve and enjoy!

I'm notorious for botching dessert recipes that require even the tiniest amount of skill, but I've managed these layer cookies twice in the last month!

Sharing the wealth of this slightly-easier-than-it-looks recipe, I'm linking up at Kristen Welch's  Works for Me Wednesday and with Clever Chicks blog hop!

Project Life Monthly (June and July)

Now that I have Claire's rainbow party (and all the decorating and baking to prepare for it!) behind me, I finally started my September spreads last night! So, I'm a little behind with my monthly version of Project Life, but (fortunately?) I'm even further behind in sharing those spreads with you! Today, let me show you my June and July spreads.

June
In June, I took the girls to Louisville for a weekend and Kate stayed the whole week. Mom and Dad brought her back the following week when they came to town for (drumroll, please) Matt's ordination. As you see on the pic with his mentors, the text I gave it was "FINALLY!" If you know anything about the United Methodist system, this will make sense to you.

I split several photos across photo pockets. It's a practical solution to fitting all the photos you want, but also gives a cool look, I think. (I didn't make much room for my "June" header, though, obviously!)

The opposite page is pretty basic, except for the little "Mercurial" faces of Kate thing. Several pics from the same day showed her crazy moods, illustrating well why our word for her personality these days is "mercurial."

The back of that page highlights some of Kate's fun activities with her friends: a going-away playdate for a sweet friend who moved away, a birthday party for another friend, and then VBS at church/school.

 

July
July had to be red, white, and blue, of course, and starts with my birthday: July 4! It's such a fun birthday to have, since everybody's off work and school and we can always have big cookouts and such. We did a family brunch that morning to celebrate. My mother-in-law's birthday is the 5th, so it was a joint celebration.

This page has some pics form the brunch at the bottom, but then a special thing at the top (that, actually, I never blogged about, though I should have!) With my birthday being July 4th, I've always loved fireworks, and have said for a while that I thought it would be really neat to see fireworks from above, from an airplane. Last year, for my 30th, Matt and I looked at going on a little weekend trip to New York or somewhere, and flying home on the evening of the Fourth, so we could see the fireworks on our return flight. With new house and pregnancy and all, it just didn't make sense, but Matt arranged this year for us to take a ride in a biplane that night to see the fireworks! (If you're in Nashville, check out Music City Biplane Tours!)

It was very hot up there in July, sitting so close to the engine, so it wasn't the most comfortable way to travel, but was a really cool experience. We flew around the outskirts of Nashville, and then circled downtown a gazillion times during the big riverfront fireworks show! I called it a "bucket list" kind of experience.

My messy face girls, the clouded leopard cubs at the zoo, and riding the zoo carousel with Nala on the left. On the right, a clipping from Parents magazine, where one of Kate's zingers made it into the Baby Bloopers, and at the bottom, the heart-and-bandage logo of our foster care training class, PATH (Parents as Tender Healers).

Finally, a spread about all the fun we had watching the Olympics. We had an opening ceremonies party, and enjoyed watching gymnastics and swimming throughout the summer games. The righthand page there is just an 8.5 x 11 page protector filled with some of our crafts and coloring sheets from those fun two weeks.

Check out other folks' memory-keeping at The Mom Creative's Project Life Tuesday!

Claire's Rainbow Party

Claire's first birthday party was on Saturday! We go for her one-year checkup on Wednesday, so I'll share her milestones then, but in the meantime, let me tell you about her party! I did a rainbow theme, and it was adorable. I feel like I overdid it a little, but it's so easy to go nuts with a theme as "simple" as this. (I use snark-quotes because while it is simple overall, I didn't think about how it requires six of everything!)

First, Decor
I ordered six rolls of crepe paper streamers and seven packs of balloons (rainbow colors, plus a pack of white) from BirthdayDirect.com, which I discovered when comparing options and prices on Oriental Trading and Amazon. I used the streamers all over—hanging from the mantle, above the kitchen table, in a big rainbow stretching across the wide playroom doorway, and in the balloon and paper "chandelier" I crafted above our dining room table.

I'll be tempted to leave the rainbow chandelier up for a while! I got a pack of three paper honeycomb balls at Target and blew up seven or eight balloons, and tied them each to the chain holding up the dining room light fixture. I draped streamers through it to hang low, sweeping down close to the table centerpiece, which was just an arrangement of Claire's blocks and a couple other toys.

The Food

The party was in the afternoon, so I wasn't trying to serve a meal, just a few fun snacks. We had pita chips and hummus, "hanky panky," an hors d'ouevres my mom makes, rainbow goldfish, rainbow fruit kebabs, and  a variety of sweets. 

I didn't do the big rainbow layer cake thing, but made a little mini one for Claire's smash cake. Everybody else could choose from tie-dye cupcakes (i.e. the colored batter I used for each layer of Claire's cake, spooned haphazardly into a muffin pan and baked) and rainbow cookies with a little icing cloud. I'm going to post a how-to on those cookies later this week—I was really excited about them!

For the beverages, I flavored/tinted little bottles of water to make each color, and had a dispenser of lemonade with red raspberries, orange slices, lemon slices, lime slices, and blueberries layered over the ice (if I hadn't already taken the rainbow theme too far, that might have been where I did it! For the record, blueberries sink and the rest float.)

The Fun

All this baking and decorating to-do was all, of course, to celebrate my little Claire-Bear's first trip around the sun! Only when eating her cake did she seem to realize she was the center of attention. She was dainty about it; even as voracious as she usually is, she didn't know how to tackle this cake. She managed to eat about three of the six layers, I think. 

Things felt very chaotic to me, I guess mainly because of Kate being a little crazy, opening Claire's gifts faster than I knew what was going on. I tried to keep the guest list small and low-key with just family and a few friends who have little babies as well, but it still felt a little crazy to me. I think Kate was dealing with some jealousy, seeing Claire be the center of attention, but we had fun. Kate loved playing with Claire's new toys, and Claire was just going with the flow. :0)

Happy Birthday, Claire!