Happy Birthday Kade William!!!

I can't believe it's been a year since we were blessed with Kade!  I'm not going to lie, the first 7 months were tough.  He pretty much cried for all of them, unless he was sleeping which, thankfully, he was (and still is) a champ at.  With that said, it's been the best year of my life! 

I'm always amazed at how fast he's growing and changing.  I'm excited to see what his 2nd year brings but sad that he's no longer a small baby that I can hold and cuddle.  Oh, who am I kidding, this little man NEVER cuddled!!!  He is starting to now though.  This morning I think I got a whole 3 minutes where he sat still and drank his milk on my lap.  Otherwise it's GO, GO, GO with the Kade Man.  He's starting to give kisses too.  Kisses that only a mother could love because they are open mouth, full of drool and sometimes he sneaks in a lick with his tongue.

His favorite things earlier in the year were the Baby Bjorn and the vacuum, the only 2 things that stopped him from crying.  These days his favorites (in no particular order) are: tractors, Daddy and baths.  When he's tired and crabby in the early evening all we have to say is "bath" and he lights up like a Christmas tree!  Then he runs into the bathroom and screams (happy screams) until we get him in the tub.  He's even started helping undress himself to get in there faster.  The only thing that can deter him once we've got the water running is Daddy on the lawn mower.  Then he's torn between running outside or staying in the bathroom.  It's pretty cute to watch him weigh out the options, you can almost see the wheels turning in his mind.

We had his birthday party on Sunday with my and Erik's family.  Tonight, Lady A and some of her family are coming over to celebrate.  I think it's pretty great that Kade has a whole other family that is just as excited about today as we are.  As I've said before, he's got no shortage of love in his life.  Happy Birthday to my favorite little man!!

Some of these are repeats from past posts, but I had to put pics of Kade's actual birth day up to see how much he's changed in 1 year. 

  1st bottle, about an hour after he was born.  Erik and I were too nervous/scared to do it (we'd never fed a baby so small!!) so the nurse had to show us how it was done.  It didn't take long for us to take over though!

1st picture with mom.  Look at that little peanut!

1st picture with Dad.  We still marvel at how similar these 2 are already!  They're like 2 peas in a pod.

Get your motor running...
We gave him his birthday present early.  He's figured out how to get on and off but still hasn't mastered the art of pushing the button to make it move.  He'd rather get off and push it, or let us hold the button down for him.  Here we thought we were done spending long periods of time hunched over!

Getting a little help from Reed opening his presents.

For 1 split second we had all 4 in the same spot for a picture in Kade's new wagon.

Great minds think alike, Jeremy and Evelyn got Kade a 4 wheeler too!  Lucky Uncle Jeremy got to provide the motor while Kade steered.