The Cub turns ONE!

It's so hard to believe that we have a one-year-old now! 2016 seems to be flying by.

I had a lot of fun planning a party for the cub. We don't have any family near by, but we have lots of wonderful friends who came out to celebrate with us. The weather was gorgeous and everything turned out so perfect.

I made the felt flowers myself (Jeff helped cut a lot of them out) and I also made the cakes. I used a neat book called Candy Aisle Crafts for instructions on making the bear cake toppers. The book has directions for polar bears, but I coated mine in cinnamon sugar to make them brown bears. The felt party hat was made with some friends of ours who also have April babies!

We gave her the Hape Pound and Tap Xylophone for her birthday and she is obsessed with it. I felt like a really good mom for choosing out the perfect present....hope I can keep that up in the future. Something tells me it may be more difficult as she gets older!

Above right - what happens when people sing Happy Birthday to you for the first time and you aren't sure how to handle it. She went for the marshmallow bear first, but soon figured out the whole cake thing. Her cake was actually a stack of cupcakes.Then of course she wanted to make sure her dad understood how great cake was, too. Either that or he somehow persuaded her to share when I wasn't looking.
I made these cookies for favors. Overall it was a very DIY party and a fair amount of work. Not something we'll do every year, but it was so fun to make a big deal out of this first birthday!