1st Birthday Party

This morning Watching Baby passed the 10,000 view mark.  Thank you so much for visiting, and coming back!  There are so many topics I want to cover, but it's been hard to make time to really go into depth about things we do like cloth diapering, making his baby food, and living without daycare.  My saving grace is the diary I've kept since baby was born, and while I missed a few days here and there at the beginning for several months I've written in it every day paying special attention to milestones and behaviors as they develop.

Baby turned one this week, and we had two birthday parties to celebrate.  The first with my wife's family in NJ last weekend, and we tried something new when traveling there.  It's about a 4 hour ride depending on the traffic, and it can be much worse when there's a lot of construction in Connecticut.  We packed the car after work and treated it like a regular evening, feeding him and getting him ready for bed at around 6:30 or 7pm.  Instead of putting him to bed we got right into the car and left.  He only drank about half of his bedtime bottle, so he was able to finish it in the car.  He opened his eyes occasionally during the ride, but slept for most of it; when we arrived, however, he was wide awake and wanted to show off his walking ability to his grandparents.  He stayed up about an hour then went down sometime in the 11pm hour.  My wife read that at around 1 year old a child will start to show separation anxiety, especially around bedtime.  He's definitely been putting up more of a fight going to bed for my wife, but he goes down for his naps for me with no problem.  I try not to take it personally.

The next day we had his actual birthday party; his grandparents and uncles with their significant others were there.  My wife and I had talked about making a special cake with less sugar and fewer ingredients for baby, but we didn't have time in the end to make it.  He ended up eating the same funfetti cake that we all had, although we took away most of the frosting after he had a little taste.  We've heard of people making a smash cake; a cake that is just for the child, as the name suggests, to smash and throw all around to their heart's content.  We'd rather start teaching him right away that certain behaviors aren't acceptable when eating, and smashing up your food and throwing it around is one of them.  That said, he still gets to eat with his hands and have a little fun, but only because it's a special occasion and if he had gotten out of control we probably would have taken it away.