Birthday brunch

To celebrate Drew's big first birthday, we invited a small group of friends and family over for brunch and cake.  After being very patient for about an hour, Drew could no longer hold out and decided for himself that it was time to open gifts by...well...opening gifts, whether we were ready or not!

As he's never done this before -- or at least not since last Christmas, where he was 23 days old and slept through the whole thing -- we enlisted Big Sister to help show him how to open gifts.



I threw this pic in because I think she looks really pretty here.

Back to the Drew pics.  Of all the toys and fun stuff he got, his most favorite thing was banging on an empty Kohl's box with a plastic hanger.  Figures.

After gifts, it was time for cake.  We placed the balloons behind his chair to make a festive backdrop for photos.  He ended up having a ball pulling on them!

A few months ago, we found out that Drew was allergic to peanuts.  Fairly easy to avoid, as long as you diligently read labels.  At some point after that, we decided to have a brunch for his birthday party.  Then, we found out he appears to also be allergic to eggs.  Bummer.  I was able to whip up the entire spread without one trace of possible peanut-ness.  But it is virtually impossible to plan a brunch without using any eggs!  Sorry Drew!  I did, however, want to make sure his very first bite of birthday cake wasn't going to end with an Epipen injection and a trip to the ER. 

That being said, this was the normal, good-tasting cake we served at the party:

And this was the special nut-free, egg-free (and probably flavor-free) cake Andrew had all to himself:

We took several videos of his first taste, and Aunt Martha showing him how to dig in, but they are all too big to post here.  Tim will get them up on Flickr this week, and we'll let you know when you can go watch them all. 

So instead, here are numerous pictures of Drew eating cake.  He enjoyed it much more than his sister did on her first birthday, but I don't think any of us were surprised by that!  I really tried to cut these down to 2 or 3, but when the kid is this cute, how am I supposed to edit any of them out??

And with that, the first birthday is in the books, and we no longer have a baby.  Still wrapping my head around that one.