Lyla's Floral 1st Birthday

To celebrate Lyla's first year, we threw her a floral first birthday party!  I love, love, LOVE spring in the Pacific Northwest and all of the flowers that go with it.  There is very little to say about spring in Southern California, except that for a short window of time, everything is green from the (minimal) winter rainfall... and then the heat comes back in full force and everything resumes it's usual tan/brown color palette.  Lovely.  So when we moved to the Willamette Valley four years ago, I was totally unprepared for all the very cliché spring things to actually be a reality.  I'll never forget our first spring here how, while on a walk alongside a creek near our first apartment, we stumbled upon a broken egg; just a few yards ahead,  we found a mother duck and her clearly very freshly hatched ducklings.  I remember thinking to myself, "ohhh, so these spring stereotypes are actually real..." Now, it seems totally normal to us and come February/March we are often looking for signs that we might be done with the gray and gloom at some point (except the rain is never anywhere near being over).  Several surrounding farms usually have lambs and it's super cute watching them run around and see how they grow over the course of the spring.  We rejoice at the occasional sunny day and the very first sighting of the blossoms on the trees and the spring bulbs popping through the earth.  It has been fun to watch and see which bulbs pop up each spring when we have moved into a new property.  Our last rental had daffodils and our new home has tulips. I dream of someday having beds with successive bulb plantings so that we can enjoy one flower after the other all through the early spring and late summer.

All of that to say, I couldn't help myself when it came to choosing Lyla's birthday theme.  Flowers had me at hello.  Much of the party decor was either  DIYed by myself or my mom, or reused from Lyla's tea party baby shower--it was SO fun to be able to revisit some of those items.  Obviously, it saved money and time, but it was so sweet to be able to incorporate things that were created to celebrate her imminent arrival and use them again as she celebrated her first birthday (plus, I bet that flower garland took my dear friends Jolene and Kimber hours to put together, so it was nice to get some more mileage out of it! :)).

We were thrilled to be able to host her birthday in the backyard of our new home.  It was a great opportunity to get our family and friends to our new house and it turned out to be a pretty hot day for spring (it could have been worse--we just as easily could have had rain!).  Lyla was in a great mood (finding the right party time for a 1-year-old can be a real drag), but she seemed to enjoy herself and all of the attention.  She filled up on a ton of hummus and strawberries early on in the party, so by the time we sang to her and gave her a cupcake to smash and devour, she just poked at it and gave me bites.  Girl wasn't hungry anymore!  So anticlimactic, but pretty funny.

Many thanks to all of you who came out to celebrate our sweet girl!