Emily's 1st Birthday!

One week ago was Emily's first birthday. It's taken me awhile to write this post because we were out of town for awhile and then Justin had the camera while he was Turkey hunting. I was getting anxious to share our day with you!

The few days leading up to her birthday I had been preparing myself for a hard day. For weeks before hand I would start crying just thinking about her birthday (course it could have been all the crazy hormones in my body too). Surprisingly, however, her birthday was a great day :) I got choked up a little in the morning but I was distracted by a marketing test I had to take.

First stop of the day was to go find a girl's baby dress. We found one we liked and wrapped it up and took it to the hospital. We went to the birthing floor and explained to the nurses that today was our daughter's birthday and we wanted to donate the dress to the first girl born that day. We asked the nurses to take a picture of us with the dress though before we handed it over.

You can't really tell from the picture but it was a yellow dress with little flowers on it with a little sweater. Justin and I were holding ourselves together quite well. I think we were enjoying being able to remember Emily this way. The nurses however, were a little more emotional. They cried and thought what we were doing was so sweet. We told the nurses they didn't have to explain to the recipient why they were getting the dress, just that it was donated anonymously. I am curious who ended up with the dress and if they liked it :)

Next up that day was balloons at the cemetery with my sister and my niece and nephew. It was a really windy day so we had to stand a ways off from her grave so the balloons didn't land in the trees. We didn't get very good shots of them floating away since the wind was so crazy.

After the balloons we had cake at our house. It was amazing! I will definitely be making this again!

A few weeks prior to Emily's birthday I had a sister in law and some cousins interested in doing something for Emily's birthday. I sent out a mass message to the family telling them about the balloons and asked that if they participated to send me pictures so we could see all the balloons! The response we got from our family was just incredible! How blessed we are to be apart of such a wonderful loving family! The following pictures are from various families celebrating Emily's birthday :)

Chris and Amy's family, Wyoming



Andrea and Justin's old work buddies, Arizona

Teresa and Gorie's family, Arizona

(I love that they did it at the temple Justin and I were married in)

The rest of our family in New Mexico!

They are a little small but I couldn't get them larger without making them fuzzy :(

 

Overall it was a wonderful day and we loved celebrating her birthday. I can only imagine how much she was celebrating with her other angel babies up in heaven :) Happy Birthday baby girl!!

Thanks for reading :)