Party Girl Turns One

Maria and I shared our first birthday together yesterday. Well, the first one was last year, of course, but that was no party.  So, yesteday, she turned one and I turned hmphmrddff.  She wore a party dress for the first bit, but because it was a thousand degrees here yesterday and the party dress is a little bit vintage and appeared to be a ruffled blend of polyester and styrofoam (with possibly some MSG thrown in), we changed her out of it real quick-like. Here is the official oooooh photo:

She unwrapped her presents and did the obligatory wrapper munching and paper ripping that all one-year-olds seem to love. 

She roughed up her cupcake like godzilla on Tokyo.  I will try to include some video later, so you can get the full effect of the carnage. 

Then, she had a skin reaction to whatever garbage they're putting in cupcakes these days, so she totally lost her sugar buzz when mommy swashed her all around in the bathtub to get the frosting off.  But thankfully, she was fine. She finished off her first year only a little blotchy and buzzin and went to bed with a tummy happily filled with cupcake, milk, and gift wrap. 

I'm a podrishioner

I have long appreciated the thoughts of Greg Boyd, the sometimes controversial pastor from St. Paul. We enjoyed his sermons at Woodland Hills so much that I've continued to download them as a "podrishioner" for the years since we moved from Minnesota.  Their online community, called The Bridge, has also been enjoyable.  Here is his recent interview on biologos.org.

Pomp and Smartypants

Anna has graduated from pre-K. Holla.

She was grinning the entire ceremony, waving one-armed jazz hands at us so often that she almost missed her part in the alphabet and had to dash to the microphone to go, "X is for Xylophone," and dash back to her seat to continue her waving and grinning. Of course, we were in the audience doing the same thing right back at her.

And in an unrelated news story: Infants Look Hilarious in Naked Bath Pictures

She may talk a lot about prince charming, but daddy's still the king

For a little over a year now, Steve and Anna have been hitting the Build and Grow workshops together on Saturdays at Lowe's. It makes for good father-daughter time, plus Anna gets to pound something other than mommy's last nerve, and daddy gets to hang out at at Lowe's, where the mother ship has called him home.

Like any true princess, she has an outfit for the event. She doesn't always wear her face like this. This one was special for mommy:

She gets a patch for every project she completes, and mommy gets to sew them on the work apron for her (which kind of hurts mommy's fingers, but mommy keeps her big mouth shut):

Anna's a confident girl, and her outings with daddy at Lowe's are a big part of that. She says things like, "I'm good at building," which is true, but it sorta doesn't matter that it is. It only matters that she thinks it is. If any of those losers at pre-K say something stupid like "You're not that great" (or something that pre-Kers would actually say...), she has a pumpkin, a time capsule, a jewelry organizer, a gingerbread house, a fire truck, a helicopter, and a race car that all say otherwise. Not to mention an attentive daddy who loves her a heckuvalot more than his remotes or tools.

Here's the most recently finished project. They did race cars in honor of whatever big racing event thingy happened this weekend (that's telling, eh?), but Anna doesn't care why they made race cars. She likes her race car because she made it, and she got her daddy all to herself the whole time. What more could a princess want?