Birthday Party Fun part 2

We celebrated Noah's first birthday party (and Jimmy's surprise 30th since their birthdays are only 2 days apart) at the park! Caden's birthday is in November and it's usually cold so I wanted to have it outside at the park and it was a PERFECT park day! (weather wise) The hour and a half before the party started, getting all those last minute things together on the other hand, was quite the opposite!! Started out sending Jimmy and his mom to the party store to get balloons and then over to the park to reserve the pavilion but they were not going to be able to blow up the balloons for another 45 minutes! So, just sent him on to the park and told him I would go pick them up. (I was going to go there anyways to get him a balloon!) Made it there and had to wait for them to do my order then went to DQ to pick up Jimmy's blizzard cake that I had ordered and they took a LONG time looking in the freezer for it! Thankfully, they finally found it! Last stop, Dominoes to pick up the pizza. I had ordered it the evening before because I wanted to pick it up  shortly after they opened. When I got there, none of the pizzas were made! My order had been CANCELED!! The girl had no idea why. (I was freaking out! I was already running later than I wanted and now had no pizza!) She said she would make them right away so I asked if she would deliver for free and she said yes she would do that and that everything would be free! Thankful everything worked out (maybe not the perfect way I wanted it to go) and Noah was a little late to his party but we made it there and had so much fun with wonderful friends and family! The bigger kids played on the playground, we ate lunch and had cake, opened presents and gave away hot air balloon brownie pops as favors! Even though the day started out very stressful and I didn't think anything was going to go right, the day was beautiful and we were able to celebrate 2 out of 3 of my favorite boys for their special days!

Birthday Party Fun part 1

We had so much fun planning  Noah's Up Up & Away hot air balloon themed party! We started with a photo shoot a month before to make the invitations. (Thanks to my incredibly talented husband...unfortunately the picture quality of the invite is not very good)

 Noah loves balloons and had so much fun and gave us the best smiles! :) All of the pictures turned out so cute, I could not have asked for it to go any better! Well...could have done without Noah tipping over backwards in the basket and popping half of the balloons at once, but thankfully we had already taken quite a few pictures and Noah was not hurt. :)  Here are some of my other favorite pictures we took. The last one is when he fell over and popped all the balloons! It was also when Caden was wanting to be in some of the pictures. I love how he is just sitting playing with the grass not noticing anything was happening! :)

Zoo Day

Caden LOVES animals! Probably just as much as he loves cars! So we finally made it to the zoo!! We met Nana and Papa at the Knoxville Zoo for a fun filled day! We did not tell Caden where we were going but as we pulled in we told him we were at his surprise. He saw the sign that said Z-O-O and shouted out ZOO! He was SO excited! When we got out of the car, he was jumping up and down, talking about all the animals he was going to see! We saw lions, tigers (white and orange ones) and a bear (oh my!). As well as otters (who loved Caden's orange shirt, they kept swimming right by him and popping their heads up! It was so funny!), kookaburra, komodo dragon, rhinos, red pandas, elephants, zebras, giraffes, goats, toucan, prairie dogs, penguins and a lot more! Caden loved it! Noah did very well during the day. He was not as excited or really seem to even notice many of the animals but he was not cranky and even took a nap in the stroller! :) At the end of our day of walking around seeing all the animals, we went to the little kids cove last and they had some slides and a place to play in the water with squirting frogs! (both kids got soaking wet! Originally Jimmy started off just putting Noah's feet in but he loves the water too much and ended up all the way in!)  Caden's favorite parts of the trip (according to him) was when he got to ride the camel, brush the goats and play in the water! I won't put all the pics up but here are a few! We had a blast!!