Happy Birthday Piper

The baby is now one year old. Crazy how fast this past year has been. And crazier still is how fast Piper is growing up. She had her check up the day before her birthday and she weighs in just over 22 pounds. She is so heavy. With her size you'd expect her to be walking. She's 2 pounds more than my other kids were at this age. I guess she's just chunkin' up so she can handle playing with the big kids soon.

Just about two weeks after Piper started crawling she started pulling herself up on things. She is very inquisitive now. I'm finding that she still likes to entertain herself half the day. As long as I'm on the floor close by so that she can occasionally crawl over my legs, she's good to just explore the loft or the family room. I spend a lot of my day upstairs in the loft now because she is contained and I don't have to clean up after her.

Piper is slowly starting to show her personality. She's at the age where you can actually play things with her. And she's starting to prefer Mark when he's home. Big surprise. Every kid starts the "I want Daddy" phase around this time. But with Piper it isn't so severe...yet.

For Piper's birthday today we just took it easy. Mark took the day off and we started the day off by opening presents. We threw in a nap for the rugrat and then ended the day with a cupcake and singing happy birthday.

This is the bear that Téa and Calista picked out at Build-A-Bear for Piper. It's the closest thing to a Care Bear that we could find. The girls wanted Piper to have something soft to sleep with. Here she is snuggling with Rainbow Peach (the bear's name).
Piper loves to pull herself up to the piano now and serenade us.
The obligatory chocolate-frosting-on-the-face picture.

The funniest part about Piper with her chocolate frosting is that she didn't really like it. She finally tasted the frosting after squishing the cupcake to death for 2 minutes and her whole body just shuddered, like she was going to be sick. It was the funniest thing to watch. We actually got it on video too. It's kind of long but worth seeing.