Birthday Picnic

We decided late last week that we needed to do something to mark Charlie's big day. So we decided to enjoy the lovely weather outside at Piedmont Park in Oakland and it turned out to be SO MUCH FUN. We invited all our friends. We picked up 5 pizzas from Arizmendi. We cut up a watermelon, a pineapple and a cantaloupe. We dug up the old camping cooler and filled it with bottles of root beer, cream soda, coke zero and water. I made chocolate cupcakes and vanilla cupcakes. And in the end I even picked up "favors" in the form of packs of haribo gummy bears for all (this may have been more for mommy than for the birthday boy). We asked everyone to bring blankets to sit on and POOF! Insta-party!

It turned out to be such an awesome, chill gathering of great friends. All to wish our little guy a happy first birthday. We feel so lucky to have the great people in our lives that we do and I feel even more lucky that Charlie has such an amazing group of people in this world that love him.
Patrick, Linds & baby Holland drove up from Sunnyvale.Shawn and I decided to trade babies for a while. Charlie & Berkeley are destined to end up together I'm pretty certain. Watermelon was very popular all afternoon. The fruit and the rind.
I encourage you to enlarge this photo and take a closer look at Charlie's hair. We are struggling with how to apply sunblock without making him look like a total greaser (Berkeley doesn't seem to mind).

Does he look like me at all yet? Since the day Charlie was born I'd say 99 out of 100 people say Charlie is the spitting image of his dad. I'm totally happy with that but I wonder if any Heywood will ever surface (aside from his uber-whiteness). Steve's favorite joke to make is that he's concerned that what Charlie is going to inherit from the Heywood's is an attitude problem. Look how photogenic Patrick can be.
We've been trying to teach Charlie how to hold up his finger for "number one!" Success.
Also trying to teach him it's not polite to point.
Linds was on swing duty with E for a while. New besties.
Pre-cupcake Sam.The Isom's! Little Lizzie was Charlie's first baby friend!

Charlie loves him some Anne.

I'm pretty sure Robyn took this picture because it has a very professional feel to it.
If this is the face Courtney makes when I ask her to smile, it's going on the birthday blog post.


Post-cupcake Sam.Ella apparently approves of this cupcake. I'm pretty sure Berkeley was being punished or something because I only saw her eating pizza crust and drinking water.The Boyd boys made it! Chris spent about 99% of his time at the playground.
Those eyes!Charlie is such a happy baby. Like freakishly happy a majority of the time but usually when we take him to the park he gets really serious and he likes to just take it all in. In true Charlie form, once the party had cleared out this is what we found the birthday boy doing. Partying all by himself. Happy as can be. Happy birthday baby boy. Love you times a million.

one.

One year! Charlie is one! Every week for the past year I've received a babycenter.com update in my email saying "your baby this week..." Then it goes on to tell me what my baby is likely doing these days...what I can expect...what I should not freak out about. Today I got and update that said "your toddler this week." Really? Charlie became a toddler today? He's still my baby to me.

Having Charlie has been so much fun. He makes us smile (almost) all of the time. I feel like everything I can possibly say about parenthood and babies all sounds so cliche. In certain ways our lives feel 100% different than they did one year and one day ago. But it's still Steve & me. We're the same people. Just + one Charlie. And our lives are better because of him.

We gave Charlie a cupcake tonight before his bath and he employed his latest favorite method of eating. Like a dog.

Happy Birthday Char Char!!!!
(stay tuned for birthday picnic pictures!)