Memorial Day and other stuff

As you can see, I'm a little bit behind on my posting.  Such is life with a one-year-old.  However, I did want to do a quick recap of our fun Memorial Day weekend.  On Saturday morning, we drove up to Cy's parents' house on Lake Murray.  Wes, Kelly, Noah, and Liam were also there.  We stayed through Sunday afternoon (wanted Monday to rest a bit before getting back to the grind of the week) and had tons of fun swimming in the lake and hanging out with family.  Gemma had fun pushing her cousin Noah around out on the porch (we were pretty impressed at her strength):

On Monday, I requested a picnic in our backyard for Memorial Day/my birthday.  My birthday was Tuesday the 31st and it ended up being sort of like Hanukkah because there was never one "official" celebration, but instead, we spread out the partying over at least eight days.  Cy had given me one of my presents (a skin for my Kindle) the week before my birthday, then we had cake and presents on Saturday at the lake, then a picnic on Monday, then presents on Tuesday (my actual birthday), then a belated present from my parents which showed up on Thursday, followed by a "birthday" lunch at Olive Garden on the Saturday after my birthday.  I was totally okay with celebrating my birthday every day for a week and a half, by the way.

Anyway, the most "official" celebration was our backyard picnic on Memorial Day.  We went to Wal-Mart early Monday morning and bought a "gazebo" (more like a tent) to provide some shade for our completely-devoid-of-trees-backyard. 

I had wanted a cookie cake but had to settle for this rather ghettofabulous graduation sugar cookie cake (it tasted okay though):

Cy wanted brownies so I made a batch using one of my birthday presents, an all-edges brownie pan:

We set up Gemma's water table and fed her some hot dog and partied outside for hours.  It was so much fun!

In other news, we took Gemma to the doctor yesterday for a weight check since she was underweight at her 12 month checkup.  Her weight was pretty much exactly the same as last month (16 pounds, 4 ounces).  Fortunately, she had not lost any weight.  We talked with the doctor a bit and he didn't seem overly concerned, since she eats extremely well (all day long and everything in sight pretty much) and is otherwise healthy.  I think she is just doomed to be like her dad (I was always underweight as a child too - wish I still had that problem!), but it would make me feel better if she would at least start gaining some weight.  So prayers that she would gain weight and grow and stay healthy would be much appreciated!

We have a big weekend coming up this weekend - we are heading up to Ellerbe for my sister's high school graduation.  Hopefully I will follow up with another blog post detailing the events in a more timely manner than this blog post!