Our Little Diva Turns One

Yesterday (September 29th) was Victoria Elizabeth's first birthday. We had a small family party with cake and presents, and enjoyed the time-honored tradition of letting the baby eat her first birthday cake on her own.

Now we know that there is a wide variety of babies' reactions to this tradition. However, I don't ever remember a one-year old being such a Diva that she would freak out at the idea of frosting getting on her fingers and would insist on neatly eating a few bites of her cake--with a FORK!

We should have had an inkling of her clean handed tendencies after the dry run that we had last weekend. Liz, Tori, and I were in Washington DC last week and spent some time with her cousin Lexie who turned one on September 22nd. It was fun to see the "cousin babies" together, being so close in age. Lexie was gracious enough to let Tori crash her birthday. As you will see on the link, the cousins had slightly different reactions to the beautiful cakes that Natalie made. While Lexie inhaled nearly half of hers, Tori spent her time complaining about getting frosting on her fingers. Uh-oh.

In both cases (last week and yesterday) she did seem to enjoy the idea of eating some cake, at least a little bit. Yesterday's offering was a pumpkin spice cake with cream cheese frosting that Liz made from scratch. Tori liked the cake and wanted to eat it. . . just not by hand. So we handed her a fork and after a few examples and some prodding, she was eating like a pro (at least for a one-year old).

We have some other videos and pictures of our trip back east that we need to catch up on, but for now here are some pictures of Tori and her cake.

This first picture was taken right after we calmed her down from the traumatic experience of making her it with her hands. The fork really calmed her down (notice the big tears in her eyes).

But wait! She realizes that there is still a small amount of frosting on her fingers.

And protests by showing it to us, hoping we will wipe it off.

Then she finally calms down enough to go to work on the cake.


She was very good at getting little bites of frosting (again, for a one-year old).

And quickly learned how to get the food from the plate to her mouth.