Our little monkey is a big 1-year-old now! 

Okay, so our celebrations went on and off for about a week…

The weekend before Justin’s big day, we threw him a little party for our Bellingham friends.  Just a few people came, but they were important ones!  Justin got a visit from his Nouno Niko (up from California) and from our friends, the Rushes.  We had cupcakes and opened a gift or two – Justin played with Miss Magnolia (which very sadly, I didn’t get any pictures of), and a good time was had by all.  We did the whole candle in the cake thing with Justin’s nouno (btw, nouno=godfather):

And yes, as is for all little boys, the flame was indeed the star attraction of the day.

On Sunday, our friend Brooksana and her daughter Sam came by for a visit. 

What was so funny about his opening of Brooksana and Sam’s gift was that there was a small plastic cow in the gift bag which Justin grabbed first and promptly exclaimed, “Mooooo!”  Which we found very funny since we haven’t really heard him “moo” before. 

Next on the birthday agenda (after the Justin-cold that left us with a clingy, green-boogered leprechaun for St. Patty’s Day), was Justin’s 1-yr doctor visit.  Just how big is our boy?  For the official stats, see below -

weight: 26lbs 1oz

height: 32 inches (that’s well off the chart!)

teeth: 8

words: around 20 and counting.  My favorites to hear are “cracker”, “‘loon!” (meaning balloon), and his new elephant sound (he makes a high pitched “vvnn!” sound). 

Saturday morning we headed for Seattle for Justin’s weekend with his grandparents.  Nanna and I made a dino cake:

That evening, Matt’s mom, Rosalie; along with my family (mom, dad, sister, niece, nephew); and our friends, the Tasto’s (along with their 18-month-old, Edwin).  The two littlest guys were awesome to see together, and both seemed to have a good time.  Edwin, of course, had to help a little (I don’t know that Justin could have gotten through all that wrapping paper without his help!).  Here are a couple of my favorite pictures:

in this last picture, Justin seemed to want a little privacy to open his gift, so he crawled under the table with his gift.  It was just too funny!  Edwin had to coax him out with another one of his new toys:

Then it was on to the cake!  Justin, of course, had to have the head of the dino for his own.  And Justin, being super into forks right now, needed his toddler fork to do the dino-damage-duty.

After about 5 minutes, the fork went bye-bye, and Justin engaged himself fully in the ultimate in dino carnage!

Some of the un-pictured highlights included singing “happy birthday” to Justin, and his utter delight in being sung to by all those people (he seemed to say, “I don’t know why you’re singing to me, but I like it!”).    Also, he said a few words for the first time that weekend: “thank you” and “kitty” were the top two.