Keitra's Birthday Party

On Wednesday, September 17th Keitra completed her first year of life! We celebrated her first birthday on Saturday, September 20. We only invited our family that lives in the area plus two friends and our house was completely full! When Ken and I were discussing all the people we wished we could have invited, we came to the conclusion that we either need a much bigger house or fewer good friends. We'll look into the house thing...

So here are pictures from the party. It's taken me almost a month to post about it because I really wanted to post videos instead of pictures. The videos we took tell the story much better, but it may take us until her next birthday to figure out what file size and format Blogger prefers for video and how to convert our HD home videos into that file type/size in Linux so for now I've reconciled myself to telling the story in still shots and typed narration...

I decided to go ahead and make the birthday cake, despite my OCD tendency to make a cake perfectly or not at all, but I vowed to keep it simple in an effort to avoid an anxiety attack. I bought two boxed cake mixes and two containers of pre-made vanilla frosting, thinking one container should fully frost one cake mix. The day of the party I discovered this was not true--I barely had enough frosting to cover the two layer 13x9 inch cake. You could still see the cake through the frosting in places and there was definitely not enough for any borders or writing. Without time to buy more frosting and not really time to make more, I improvised, as you can see by the picture. It turned out surprisingly well, considering a half hour before party time I was staving off the feeling of inevitable impending disaster...The flowers are all from our yard. They were so beautiful that I figure if I don't include any pictures of their said yard of origin, you can all remain happily ignorant of the actual state of that yard. The sunflowers are actually "weeds" that have been sprouting uninvited in our garden every year since we moved here. I admit we haven't worked very hard to keep them away...


Keitra was actually pretty nervous and unsettled with everyone watching her when it was time for the birthday cake.

It wasn't until I cut up her cake, people started getting their own cake and were not watching her as much, that she really went at it.

She was just so perfect in her little red plaid outfit and ladybug clips! Both were given to us by our friend Kami.

You can see more of the clips she makes here.

All in all the party was a great success. Keitra got a lot of loot, we relaxed, stuffed our faces and enjoyed each other's company, and apparently partied a little too hard...