Ethan's Birthday - July 2nd

So our little guy turned the big ONE! We had a fun filled day with my mom, my sister, and Philip's mom. First was birthday boy breakfast with bananas and a pancake. He looks really excited to be one in this picture:
After breakfast there were a few presents left from mommy and daddy to open (he had been practicing opening presents all week). Ethan got a few books and a few new cars.

He loves driving these cars around saying, "Vmmmmm".
His birthday outfit even had Elmo on it! In the morning all the Stelly women brought Ethan to Stroller Strides where he received his own birthday balloon. After stroller strides we went home and finished up the last details for the party. This included Elmo name tags, Ethan picture flags for the subs, and Ethan's career poster (seen below).

Danielle, my mom, and I went and went to decorate at the cove during Ethan's afternoon nap.

Look at that awesome baby Elmo. Auntie is more of an artist than we knew!

We had such a great time with all of our family and friends.

Because of the location and Ethan's age we decided to wait to open presents later, but we did have cake.

Before:


After:
If you want to see more pictures of Ethan opening gifts I've posted them to our flickr site. But the toy he opened first you just have to see:

Philip and I feel so blessed. One of the neat things that I got to do for this day was to go back and read all of our blog entries from the day of Ethan's birth. I was reminded of God's sovereignty and grateful for the peace that we felt during that time. I was also warmed to read the many comments left by friends and family during that time. Thank you all!

Oh, I talked earlier about a career board that we made for Ethan and here is a picture of it:
I don't know how well you can see the words but we basically found a bunch of cute pictures of Ethan that might depict a future career. People were able to place votes about what they thought Ethan would grow up to be. We originally saw this idea at Mr. Lee's daughter's first birthday party. As voted by the people Ethan will either be a musician or a naturalist/park ranger.