Evan's First Birthday

We celebrated Evan's first birthday up at Grandma and Grandpa Welling's house. We invited our families to come and celebrate. My brother and sister and their families came and Corey's brother paul and his family came over. This was a last min. decision to throw a party. My whole family has been sick with a head cold, and since I was not working at the motel that night I didn't have the large lobby at my disposal. Grandma offered to buy pizza and hold a gathering at her house. We were already up there because she was coloring my hair. I agreed and we threw together a quick party with balloons I had bought earlier that day. Blueberry muffins I had baked the night before (which represented the cake.) Ice cream from Grandma's freezer and pizza from pizza hut.

I really had not been looking forward to celebrating and that is perhaps why I kept putting off making any plans. Evan is my last baby and I was not ready to let him grow up and be a one year old. But try as I may to keep him my baby, he will in fact grow up and I need to get over it. I swore I would never do this to my youngest child....because I remember (being the youngest in my family) everyone telling me, "you can't grow up, you have to be the baby." And I had serious guilt over not being able to fulfill their wishes. I even wrote my parents a letter when I was little apologizing for not being able to stop the fact that I was growing up.....that is how guilt ridden I was. And now here I am repeating the same mistake. Luckily Evan is not old enough to know just how sad his mama is.

This is Jason's oldest daughter Abigail holding Evan. Ever since the divorce we don't see much of the girls anymore. Jason gets to have them on Wednesday nights and every other weekend. The girls love my boys and especially love to hold the baby. We have been fortunate that both Thayne and Evan's birthdays fell on a Wednesday. It was nice to have them at the party.

Eating his "cake."

Aunt Heather was a little late in attending the festivities, but made up for it by bringing a singing Elmo to the party. The kids spent the night singing and dancing to the hokey pokey with Elmo.