One Year Old!!

It seems so weird that our child is ONE YEAR OLD! Sometimes it feels like the day he was born is worlds away. Other times it feels like it just barely happened. I remember holding him at 1 and 2 weeks old and thinking how long it will take before he is one year old. Now, his first birthday is here. Crazy! 

 By the way, don't you think we should call it the 2nd birthday. After all, his first birthday was the day he was actually born, right?

 We started some family traditions with Tanner's birthday. We want our birthdays to be a day for celebrating life by being grateful for all that we have and all the people that make our life so wonderful. So in order to celebrate, we decided there should be 4 components to a birthday "party": 1) Simple 2) Special 3) Service oriented and 4) Spending to a minimum.

We had a lot of fun following the 4 "S" rules. We kept it Simple by going out to dinner with just Jeremy, me and Tanner. That meant minimal planning, cooking, and cleaning. We also had a very simple gift for him: a small cake and balloon. We made the day Special by singing to Tanner every time that he woke up from sleeping. And I sang him birthday songs all day long, which is a repertoire of about 6 birthday songs. We also decorated his helmet with some birthday paraphernalia. For the Spending part of his birthday, we only spent a total of $8!

These are pics of Tanner on his birthday. He is playing with some baby gifts for his future cousins. He loves the vibrating swing and figured out how to turn it on and off. 

Picture below: How big is Tanner? SOOOO big!

As mentioned above, we went out to eat for his birthday. The Italian restaurant in Newport Beach was super yummy! We went because we had a gift card.

 Tanner LOVED the bread sticks with olive oil and garlic. He also gobbled up the ravioli.

 Our dinner was super yummy and cheesy!!

 Everyone in the restaurant sang to Tanner. He looked completely flabbergasted! He just gazed wide-eyed at everyone with a slightly surprised and confused look on his face. Then we gave him the cake. He dipped his fingers in the frosting and was so perplexed that it was sticking to him. He kept showing the man behind us. The man was so nice to him, talking to him and touching his frosting. Tanner didn't want to eat the frosting at all. He eventually pushed the cake away! I was really shocked since he loved my chocolate bar from a few weeks ago.

For the Service oriented part of his birthday, we went to the Orange County Food Bank on Saturday. We called ahead to make sure that Tanner could join us. They were very excited to have a baby come! We filled boxes of food for poverty stricken senior citizens in the community.

 We worked with a girl scout troop and a Buddhist charity group. Our goal was to fill 800 boxes in the 2 hours, but we ended up filling 982!!

 Tanner was a really good sport. He watched from Jeremy's back while he worked on filling dried milk and I taped the filled boxes shut. After a while, Tanner got really sweaty in the backpack carrier, so I held him and showed him around while Jeremy taped and moved the filled boxes. Jeremy and I took turns watching Tanner while the other person worked. Tanner also chilled in the stroller for a little while, too. During one of my turns watching Tanner, some PR men from the Buddhist charity group asked if they could interview me about bringing Tanner to the food bank on his birthday. They hooked me up with a mic and filmed me! They said we might end up on a Tawainese news story!

It was a LOT of fun and a LOT of work. For the first 20 minutes I was super energized and pumped. But then I started realizing this was a lot of physical work, more than other times that I've done this! I admit there were a couple times when I wondered, "Are we done yet?!" When we did finish, I felt so accomplished! We were told later that our jobs- taping and stacking the filled boxes- were the hardest. Jeremy especially worked up a great sweat!

It was important to me that we did something meaningful like this on Tanner's birthday as a way to give back to the community. There have been so many people- family, friends, coworkers, church members- that have done a lot for us this past year. It was kind of my way to say thank you to all of them and to our Heavenly Father for all that we have been given during Tanner's first year of life. And when Tanner is older, I think it will be really cool to tell him that he helped fill 982 boxes of food on his first birthday.