It was just yesterday...

Well, literally it was just yesterday that our Abigail Grace had her birthday, but also I feel like it was just yesterday that we were welcoming this little bundle of joy into our lives. I can still remember her birth day with all the tiny precious details and everything. She was so beautiful to us even in her first few minutes, hours, days. Now, she's tons more beautiful than just two years ago. I often hear my grandpa's voice in my head and he used to say to me and my sister when we were so little, "This is when you stop growing up!" I tell Abby that all the time now that I understand. I don't want her to grow up anymore. I love this age so much! I don't want my time to slip away so quickly like it has already!





We had a great day yesterday celebrating. We had a small get together for dinner and we enjoyed singing Happy Birthday to our girl. She even wanted to sing it to herself!





I can't believe I have a two year old! Happy Birthday baby girl - I don't think I can get away with calling her that anymore!

Oh boy, oh boy...it's Abby's 2nd Birthday!

The last couple weeks have been a lot of fun looking forward to things to come! We couldn't wait for our ultra sound where we not only got to check on the progress of our lil' one swimming inside but also to find out whether "it" was a boy or a girl! And then to add on top of that we couldn't wait to be celebrating our princess' 2nd birthday (coming up already on Tuesday 2/9)!

While both of those events were looming, I had these huge plans to make them as festive as I could and I was thinking of fun ways to celebrate. My first idea was to go with this super cute themed party for a "revealing party" that I heard from my friend Courtney and through this cute website, Hostess with the Mostess. I was thinking of how fun it would be for all of our friends and family to get together and guess what they thought the baby would be and they would come to the party dressed in either blue or pink. Then we would have had a cake baked where the inside layer of icing was the color of the gender of the baby, and the outside stayed all white. Everyone could be in suspense together to find out and Robbie and I would cut the cake and reveal to everyone the sex of our baby at this party. How fun would that be?!

Then I thought it would be super efficient to tie in a birthday party with the revealing party since they were happening close together. The cake would double as a birthday cake and Abby would be celebrated with all of her friends there too! I was going to go with this "No. 2" theme, where we were celebrating 2 events, Abby's 2nd birthday and the revealing of our baby #2. The ideas were all coming together and I was getting really excited to pull it off.

But then came scheduling, the logistics of planning (ie: location, time, cost, etc.) and opinions - lots of opinions. While I loved hearing everyone's take on these exciting celebrations, I decided it was going to be easier on everyone (especially me and Robbie) if we didn't do either of them. Needless to say I was bummed out...

So bless their hearts, my HomeGroup and my Tuesday Girls allowed me to still bake a cake to "reveal" to them about our baby, and today I was SUPER surprised when my friends had secretly coordinated a surprise birthday party for my little angel (I hope to post pictures later from this party). I can't tell you how special each of these moments were for us! All I can say is that I have AWESOME friends and I love them SOOOOO much! I know the ultimate result from any of our parties were going to be just sharing in these exciting times with our friends and family and we were still fortunate to be able to do just that!



By the way, in case you hadn't guessed yet by the title of this post, we're having a BOY!!

Photos...

I didn't want to forget to post these photos because I really appreciated a friend of ours who took them. Cindy Kyle took our family photos for us right before Christmas and I was able to swing putting together a New Year's card (since I was so behind on Christmas!) and a cute gift for our parents.

I put together this card using design elements from Little Dreamer Designs...



And I made this design as a gift for our parents - I used it on a paper weight/shelf art mold. It turned out really cute!

And these are just the rest of the photos from Cindy...while the photos are great, my only critique is my own daughter who wouldn't smile in most of them.

Also, since I was so behind on posting these photos, I also realized that I was behind on sharing some Christmas-time photos from our family fun. So I went ahead and added a slide show for you to peruse through if you should desire

(<----- over on the side panel).