Birthday!

I totally missed blogging last weekend and now Emmaline's birthday has come and gone! I think she had a good day. She went to daycare since it was a workday. We felt a little guilty not being with her the whole day, but felt like it was too weird to take a day off. The good thing about it is that she loves daycare! We baked some of our delicious pumpkin cupcakes and took them in with her. Several of the older babies (already 1 or close to it) got to have cupcakes together. They took some pictures so we're hoping to get copies of those soon. We went out to dinner that evening (3 Brothers Burgers) and she had a little bit of hamburger meat, but mostly shoved that aside so she could eat sweet potato fries. Unlike the ones we cook at home, these ones were covered in cinnamon and sugar. I wasn't too thrilled about giving her more sugar, but it's her birthday so we caved. When we got home there was a box from my parents so she got to open that. My friend (who is due with a baby girl any day now) came by and brought presents. Emmaline received a HUGE box from her other grandparents the day before. The downside - she isn't that excited about opening presents. We've gotten a few cute pictures of her playing with the box or tissue paper. Honestly though, she's really not into those things either. A few of the things she's received have been big hits so far - a fork and spoon from her auntie, monster squirt bath toys from her godparents, doll and play bottle from my aunt, and puzzles from a co-worker.

Today (the day after her birthday) was a fun day too. We went to the Little Gym for our regular class. Emmaline was way more outgoing than she usually is. I think she's getting very comfortable with the setting. We also went to the Festival of Leaves and walked around for a bit. It's an annual event and vendor set up booths and whatnot. They also open the historic museums near Main Street for free. The only thing we really got out of it (other than exercise) was talking to a couple different people about gutter cleaning and guards. I guess that was fitting since it was the Festival of Leaves and we're trying to get the freaking leaves out of our gutters. Since the house is 2 stories tall on 1 side b/c we're built on a hill, Dan can't get up on that side to clean them out. We don't actually have any trees on our property, but the neighbor has some huge ones that drop a ton of leaves. (We raked 20 bags one year!)

Tomorrow is her party. We are having that at the Little Gym as well. We're very excited about it and can't wait to see people. Most of the guests are co-workers and their kids. A couple friends from college are coming from out of town and bringing their kids (or in 1 case, just coming since they don't have kids). Emmaline's friend from Sign Language class is also coming from out of town. We invited the other babies that she's been going to daycare with for a while, but never heard back from them so I'm not expecting them to show up. Don't blame them, I'm not really sure if we would have shown up if we'd been invited to their parties since we don't know them outside of daycare. For one of the babies, I've never even met the parents. But I know Emmaline adores these kids and I would actually like to meet the families so maybe they could get together occasionally "after hours".

As for developments, she has some weird spot on her face. I'm thinking that it's an eczema kind of thing. It's gotten bigger over the past month, but looks like it might be fading now. She goes to the doctor on Tuesday for her 12 month check up and vaccinations so we're hoping to figure out what the doctor thinks about it. About a week ago, Emma got ahold of an apple out of the cupboard. She started chomping away on it and before we knew it had eaten it to the core (we got it away long enough to cut the core away, but she'd already eaten the stem)! I was worried that she would gag once she got down to the smaller bits, but she did great. Today she grabbed a nectarine as I was putting away some groceries and did the same thing (we took it in plenty of time to cut the pit out).