T and V's Birthday

T’s birthday gift last year was a baby girl, born at 10:03pm. This year he got an ice cream maker. Almost as good, right? I actually gave it to him a month in advance, mostly because I found it on clearance and wanted to make sure he liked it, and also because I had a hankering for homemade ice cream. Notice that he is most excited about the fact that is makes frozen cocktails. Party at the Butlers'!

Their actual birthday was November 3rd. Since I have my backdrop up, I tried to get some pictures of the birthday girl. Most of them were out of focus because she was toddling all over, but this one captured her pretty well. Her current stats: She is around 20 lbs and 2 ft tall, which are both rough guesses. (She wears 12-18 month clothes so she must be pretty average.) She has 8 teeth. She walks pretty well but still stumbles a lot and likes to point at everything and babble. For the first few months of her life she had a single long hair on her crown (her “antenna”) but now she has a few tufts at the crown and the back – just enough to look messed up after she’s been taking a nap. She has been both my worst and my best sleeper. For the first two months she cried nonstop from dusk till dawn every single night. Was it colic? I’m still not sure. She slowly grew out of that and into a night owl, going to sleep between midnight and 2am but then sleeping for a good 12 hours. None of the boys would sleep that long at that age without waking up to eat at least once. Now she typically goes to sleep between 10 and 12 for up to 12 hours and takes a good nap in the afternoon. I love that if I catch her at the right time, I can even put her down awake and she drifts off to sleep without a fight. She is a happy, fun girl, and we love her a bunch!

That evening, all four grandparents came to our house for cake and presents. T made V her own little pink cake (notice the V in the frosting) which she enjoyed thoroughly. She got a singing purse and a Baby Alive doll, both of which she has been playing with a lot. Of course, she had to test out the baby's bottle first thing. We have already noticed that she seems to favor baby dolls more than the boys did even though they had dolls to play with and she has all of their old toys at her disposal. We don’t feel like we have especially encouraged it, but maybe we have without realizing it. It’s the old debate of nature vs. nurture, I guess.


Oh, yeah - it was T's birthday, too. Happy birthday, honey!