To Do:

My life has been one massive To Do list for the past several months, hence my lack of blogging. I have so much super news to share though. First and foremost - after 2 long years of struggling to begin my career I have been offered a position as a mental health practitioner working with children in a community setting. I am more than excited! Final I can begin to use my hard earned masters degree! I will begin this new endeavor on Nov. 21st! After 6 years of working in my current position it was scary to make the change, but it is for the best. The one down fall is that we will be paying quite a lot more for health insurance for our family each month and by "quite a more" I mean several hundreds of dollars. I am hoping we can make spending cuts in other areas and make this work out. It was necessary that I make this move in order to start my career though.

My actual planning frenzy began with trying to find my daughter the perfect Halloween costume. I settled on a baby cow. Here is a picture of the costume which I snagged off of Amazon.com  This is not a picture of my daughter, but you can see how cute the costume is. She looked absolutely adorable on her First Halloween!

I actually got this costume with some of the credit I received for selling back textbooks at Amazon (which I mentioned in a previous post).

After Halloween was taken care of including the painting of and carving of pumpkins I moved on to the next big event. My daughters 1st birthday. Now this was a 2 part event. First of all her actual birthday which was on Friday, November 11th and then her birthday party which was on Sunday, November 13th.

For her actual birthday I had to find and purchase the perfect presents for her, and then assemble and wrap the presents. I also had scheduled an appointment for professional family pictures that day and so I had to find coordinating outfits for both my husband and I as well as outfits for my daughter for both family and individual pictures. The pictures turned out amazing! The lady (Trisha) that we go to is so good with kids. I didn't discover her until after I got my daughter's newborn pictures done and was very disappointed with the quality. We decided to go with Trisha for her 3 month pictures and have returned to her for 6 month and now 1 year pictures. Here is her website: Trisha Schumacher Photography I would recommend her to anyone! We drive an hour just to get to her studio, but it's totally worth it. One of the best things about her is that she actually shares the copyright with you and puts your images on a CD so that you can print as many photos as you want wherever you want to print them. I love that!

Here is what my daughter got from mommy and daddy for her first birthday and she absolutely loves it! She can open the door and crawl in by herself and even shut the door. She likes to beep the horn by kicking her foot and making her heal hit the horn. She gets a huge smile on her face when we push her around and give her a ride in her car. Overall she is adorable in her Princess Cozy Coupe by Little Tikes:

I will say too that I put this entire bad boy together. It took me like 2 1/2 hours. It was not fun in the least, but I did it and I usually don't do things like that. I usually make my husband "deal" with all of the assembly projects. So, woo hoo for me!

Other gifts from my husband and I included:



Wonderworld Eco-Friendly Blocks



Melissa & Doug Magnetic Fishing Puzzle



Fisher Price Elephant Shape Sorter



Princess Cozy Coupe & Trailer: From Toys R Us

Wonderworld Blocks: From Amazon (bought with credit from my books I sold)
Melissa & Doug Puzzle: From Amazon
Elephant Shape Sorter: From Kohls

And for Part 2: The Party - it took about 2 months of preparation and it was over in 4 hours! So much planning and work went into her party, but it was all worth it. So many family members and friends attended to share my daughter's special day and everything went perfectly. Thank you so much everyone who was a part of this. It meant so much that you could be there to help us celebrate!

This was the theme:

I ordered the main party supplies from Oriental Trading and got accessories from Walmart, Target, Hobby Lobby, Party City, & ABC Toy Zone.

And I made 3 dozen cupcakes and 3 cakes! I never bake so was incredibly proud of myself for doing this and I think they turned out great!

The reason it took 2 months of preparation is that it was important to me that we could host the party at our own house, however the room we wanted the party to take place in happened to have turned into a storage room during the almost 6 years we have been in our house. With my husband's help we were able to clear away everything in the room creating a very large space for the party! This was a huge project and I vow never to allow the room to get back to that state of disarray. I read several books on home organizing in order to become motivated and educated enough to complete this huge project. It was all worth it though for my little girl and I will continue to keep organizing and decluttering our house. I have already come so far and have accomplished so much. I want to keep up with it so that I have the space to do the projects that I want to do (such as create a scrapbook for my daughter which I have yet to start). I also want to be able to invite people over to my home more often and allow my daughter to have friends over when she gets to that age of wanting to do that. It is important to me that we have a livable home, a place we feel comfortable in.

Upcoming things on my To Do list are: Prepare for Thanksgiving, My Husband's Birthday (The 29th of November), & Christmas, Attend my nephew and niece's birthday parties, Christmas shop for family while being mindful to my budget, find a Christmas dress for my daughter and order Christmas cards. Oh and send out thank you cards for the birthday party. So as you can see my plate is still quite full! I will keep you all posted on the progress of these next project leading into the new year!