We have a 1 year old!

We had a fun birthday morning with Ashley opening presents.  In my opinion, she got way too much stuff 🙂  She is such a good girl that we (Kathryn) couldn’t help it.

We had a great party later that evening.  Mom and Dad made the drive from Idaho.  Mom made a fantastic dinosaur cake for Ashley.

Why a dinosaur cake?  Well, really the whole party was dinosaur themed.  So first, why a dinosaur theme?  Well, Ashley likes to make a rawring sound, so we’d ask her “What does a dinosaur say?”  “rawwwwr!”  Kathryn decorated the place in dinosaur fashion with dinosaur jokes on the mirror, dinosaur silhouettes hanging from the fan, dinosaur facts on the wall, and dinosaur themed snacks in the kitchen.

Now, back to the cake.  When I was 4, I had a great dinosaur cake myself.  Mom was able to borrow the very same cake pan from her friend and make one for Ashley.  She really did a fantastic job decorating it! 

Ashley had her own cake that Kathryn made and our friend in the ward decorated.

It really wasn’t much of a cake smash.  More of a dainty cake test.  Ashley is just too sweet and gentle to go smashing into a cake I guess.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing when we’re talking about babies in the house.

We had a fantastic turnout for Ashley’s party.  She is a very lucky girl to have so many people support her!  Thanks for all the generous gifts!

Kathryn and I made a slideshow of some of our favorite pictures and videos of Ashley first year.   We are so proud of her.

This is an after birthday update.  She has been really liking her sweet elephant ride.

I caught this picture on the crib cam 🙂  “Dad, I know you can see me!  Come get me!”

We had a great Halloween this year.  Kathryn was really fun and creative!   I really liked the Flintstone costumes Kathryn made.   T-shirt costumes that you can wear all day are perfect.  Then she made some nutter butter ghost cookies.  We don’t have a dedicated double boiler pan, but check out Kathryn’s creation below.  It worked great and got the job done.  The cookies were great.  To go along with our costumes, Kathryn made a little dinosaur for Ashley to carry.  It looks really good from the side, and really funny from every other angle with it’s only two legs 🙂  Halloween had fantasitc weather.  We sat outside until it got dark.

Last Saturday, we had a house project day.  Kevin was very kind to come over and help us blow in insulation into the attic.  We’ve been waiting to do this project ever since we bought the house, but we’ve never felt ready to commit because we’ve always had a couple more projects we wanted to do.  Well, we finally decided the time was right to do this project.  With the Questar Gas rebates, we thought we might be able to have a contractor come in and do this for us.  We got a quote, but it was still quite expensive even with the rebates.  So we looked into doing this ourselves.  Turns out it was much cheaper as you’d expect, and this was not a difficult project.  Friday night we had a Home Depot date night and packed up the car and trailer full of insulation supplies.  Saturday we got to work.  You cut the insulation bails in half and then feed those into the chopper/blower machine.  It has a 100 foot hose you run up into the attic.  Kevin and I communicated via a 1.75 hour phone call.  I had the phone in my pocket and when I’d yell, he’d hear that and turn of the machine.  It all went pretty smooth.  It took the better part of a day to do the project in total between all the prep work in the attic, actually blowing  in the insulation, and then the clean up.  We hope it makes the house more comfortable and lowers the heating and cooling costs.

After church picture from last week.

And it seems winter is here.