Jacen turns 1!

Well, ladies and gentleman, it's been 1 year since Jacen was born. It's really hard for me to think that it's been that long since I finished an awful pregnancy, had a great delivery, and went on to 6 weeks of a bad recovery, in the middle of finals, with no sleep. Jacen has been a great baby for us. I think Heavenly Father took pity on us for having an unplanned baby and all the other nightmares we've been having to deal with, so he sent us a good baby :) But we sure love our son; we don't know where we would've been without him!

So we pretty much started our weekend off with a trip to the Zoo on Friday (4/10), Jacen's b-day. Surprisingly, Elijah just happened to get that day off from work, and we decided it was a good time to take Jacen there. Since Twinkie no longer lives with us, we figured we might as well show him lots of animals. We first went on a train ride, and like I expected, Jacen missed EVERY animal we passed. But he sure didn't miss all the cars we passed through the parking lot!!! He got so excited about them, it was so funny!

After the train ride that didn't really do anything for him, we went around and looked for big, moving animals that he could see really well. Some of his favorites were the cougar (which he thought was a big size Twinkie and kept waving at it!), the black bear, swans, giraffe, the "warthog" looking animal, the monkeys, and the big black Gorilla. Along with those, he also liked to see the people walking around, especially the kids, the Hogle Zoo pamphlet, and the parking lot cars. I think next year we'll take him to a parking lot and he may have more fun for free than going to the Zoo!!!

After that we decided it was a good time to try a new restaurant, and thanks to Candace's idea (co-worker of mine) we ended up at Texas Roadhouse. Good steaks for a reasonable price! Jacen had some mashed potatoes and gravy, Mac&Cheese, applesauce, diced tomatoes and eggs (off my salad), and milk. He was like a bottomless pit!!!

Then today was his b-day party. It was supposed to be held in the club house where we would've had more room, but... *sigh*... it's really hard for me to tell this story without fumes coming out of my ears. To make a long story short the HOA people gave us the wrong keys that wouldn't let us in so we had to have the party in our small little place. It worked out fine because there wasn't a whole lot of people that came, but still... just the thought of... anyway. I better stop right here.
We had pulled BBQ pork sandwiches, macaroni salad (which, we just found out Jacen doesn't like tuna!), chips, and yummy cake/cupcakes. Grandma and Grandpa Glazier, Grandma Johnson, uncle James, Jenn Harris, and Devin all came to our party to wish Jacen a Happy Birthday!

The cake was FANTASTIC: my friend Jenny from work made the football cake for me (if I were to make it, I would've butchered it in no time...), and I made the little baseball cupcakes. As you can see, I'm not good at baking.

Jacen was absolutely hilarious when it was time for him to have his cupcake. As soon as I put it in front of him, he picked it up and tossed it on his tray. Then he didn't know what to do with it until I took out a piece of it and fed it to him. Then he figured it out and went to town! He ate the whole thing, which surprised me: I thought baby stomachs were smaller than that!

This is the last time I'll be doing monthly updates on him, so here it goes: we took him to Dr. Witt yesterday and he weighed 26lbs even, 31 1/8 inches long. He dropped below the 90th percentile for both height and weight, but that's because he's getting more mobile, which is good. He learned to say hi, and he'll do it repeatedly when he's around his teddy bears. He's also saying "moo" when we read his "Mr Brown can Moo" book. He's cruising really good now, and will even stand on his own for a few moments without realizing it. He's switched from formula to whole milk now; that was easy. He's down to 3 bottles/day, and we're now working on getting rid of the bottle and giving him milk out of his sippy cups. I wanted to switch him from disposable diapers to cloth diapers to help him with potty training, but it's very expensive to start, so we'll be delaying that for a while. One of his b-day presents was a potty, and tonight he sat on it for the first time and LOVED it!!! Obviously he didn't do anything in it, but it was a start!

We're so glad to be parents to a loving, wonderful son. He makes us proud every day and we couldn't love him more!!!

Happy birthday Jacen!