Augh, is it already Thursday??? I’ve been going through pictures from April and May so I can scrapbook them but I need to take a break from that to go through pictures from last weekend! I say weekend because we celebrated the babies’ first birthday all weekend long! Matt’s parents and Mark and Sharla arrived on Friday evening. The babies were feverish on Saturday morning with boogers EVERYWHERE. Zach just wanted to sit still and be held and Rissa just wanted to sleep. We called our pediatrician and took them in while everyone else got to go to the Farmer’s Market. Our poor babies have a virus and we just have to wait for them to get better. They are disease fighting champions, as this is only the second time they have been sick and they are already 1 year old, so we hoped they would pull through quickly so they could enjoy their many fans during the weekend! Tim arrived on Saturday night, and the rest of the guests came just for the party on Sunday afternoon. Matt’s parents stayed at a hotel and we managed to finish our renovations enough that Mark and Sharla could use the guest bed! Whee for us! We played with the babies, and when we weren’t doing that, we played games and ate yummy food! It was great.
I wasn’t sure how to do the babies’ birthday. I love to cook and I love to host and I love having guests and I love being a mommy. But doing all of those things at the same time is hard to prioritize! Matt and I originally wanted to make all the party food ourselves because we love to throw parties and this party was a gift from us to our beautiful babies. But reality set in and we realized that we had lots of resident help just waiting for us to need them. It turns out that doing it “ourselves” was not nearly as important as experiencing a community effort of making this happen! I’d rather remember having fun than be able to claim “I did everything myself.” So we recruited and everyone was up for the challenge!
There was one detail that Matt and I needed to handle alone. For our anniversaries, we go to a small town, stay at a bed & breakfast, and always come home with a souvenir of the place we visited. Last June while I was pregnant and quickly becoming enormous, we visited Washington, IL and Matt found a kids’ cookbook filled with fun, laminated recipes. He was so excited about our twins so that cookbook instantly became our souvenir. It had a recipe for adorable cupcakes in it so we had to make those for the birthday cake! Matt and I decorated them together and Lynette and Tim documented it. We got to do the part that was most important to us and we got over ourselves for the rest of it so everyone else could help make that party happen! The party became an event where our community of loved ones came together to laugh, help, and love and that’s why it reminded me of our wedding day!
When the babies woke up from their afternoon nap, they were chipper and feeling as good as they could with a virus! Gramma and Grampa were thrilled to hang out with them upstairs in their room until everything was ready and they could make their big entrance. Gramma and Grampa babysat for us on Saturday night too while we went out for German food… it’s so nice to have parents who love our babies and spending time with them!
The actual party was really, really fun. Two of our three grandmothers were present, so Oma and Gramma held the babies while they opened their gifts. Both babies were obsessed with the balloons and Rissa wouldn’t let go of hers, even to eat her lunch! Once we got her arms through the straps of her highchair, we gave them back and the tragedy of taking them away was averted. It was refreshing that they didn’t (yet) know how to tear into the paper and demand more gifts and “mine, mine, mine.” I’m sure we’ll see that at future celebrations, but for now, it warmed my heart that the grandmothers had to help them open the gifts and that they wanted to look at each one with wonder and joy rather than just move on to the next one as quickly as possible. All of us cemented in our minds the memory of Rissa kicking around in the wrapping paper with pure joy on her face as Zach buried himself in the paper. It was beautiful to see them both so excited and happy, especially since they portray it so differently! One couldn’t blink and one couldn’t hold still. I’ll let you figure out who was who 🙂
The babies were so cute trying out the party food. They are ridiculously shameless moochers already… if they see guacamole on your plate, they will hunt you down and make you share! “Mo mo mo!!!” they demand with their little faces upturned and their hands and voices communicating the same message at the same time. Rissa attacked her cat cupcake with force! She ripped his eye and ear off with one fist and happily held the frosting, sticky mess. It’s too bad she can’t fit her fist in her mouth because she barely got any bites since she wouldn’t let go! She shredded that cupcake into smitherines and was wearing most of it in her bib. Zach was much more precise. He stuck a finger into the green frosting on his frog cupcake and tasted it. Then he plucked off an eye. Then he used two fingers to get frosting. It was a meticulous process and 2/3 of his cupcake was still intact when he was finished. Neither of them was a fan of the punch, but that didn’t stop them from trying it! We have brave babies!
We had a smashing good time! We had to bathe them to get all the frosting out of their hair (both of them smeared their hands EVERYWHERE!), but that just gave them a chance to play together and splash with their new tugboat full of toys from Auntie Alana and Uncle Neil. The babies are so excited about their new books and toys — whenever we come down for playtime, they “run” (super fast crawl?) over to the new stuff and start banging on the drum or flying their airplane or reading their books. The stuff is cool and they love it! But to be honest, they were so THRILLED by the people at their party that the gifts don’t hold a candle compared to that! All weekend every time they woke up, they looked around with smiles as if thinking, “Everyone is still here? Oh wow! We didn’t miss out by taking a nap! Let’s keep playing!” We’re so proud of them for valuing the good stuff — loved ones!
