ONE YEAR - how did that happen?

She absolutely loves her chair these days and climbs on and off of it a millions times a day.  Sometimes she likes to just sit in it "like a normal person" (that's what Logan said).

My sweet Palmer girl is one year old.  I am so slow getting this post done because life has been a little crazy lately.  I'll give my excuses quickly and then we'll move onto the birthday girl.  Our house is still not done, but my grandma's house sold so we moved in with my parents (bless their hearts).  I hate moving, so the thought of moving twice in such a short amount of time makes me want to cry.  We are living out of boxes right now because we don't want to unpack any more than is 100% necessary.  Luckily my parents are the best people in the universe to live with so that takes away some of the pain.  I've taken on some new coding work and I'm still trying to figure it all out so I've been spending WAY too much time coding lately.  On top of all of that I feel like I take about 100 calls and run back and forth to our house 100 times a day.  Our general contractor moved a couple of months ago and the house has turned into a huge source of stress for us lately.  I've almost lost all excitement about it ever getting done...maybe that's because I secretly don't believe that it will actually ever be done.
But let's talk about the good stuff - how in the world did my sweet little girl get to be one year old already?!  On her actual birthday I decided to take a break from the coding and spend more time cuddling and playing with her.  We went swimming, which is something we haven't been finding the time to do lately.  It was a fun time at the pool; lots of her friends (and mine) were there that day.  After her nap we went over to Heather's house and she helped me make cake pops for Palmer's party that was planned for the next night. 

I'm sad because this picture didn't capture Heston and Wyatt, but they were there too.  I think you get a nice shot of Nicole's lovely toes at least.  Heather and her kids showed up a little later that day too.

Seriously, how cute is this sweet little one year old?

The next day we had my family come to my parents' house for a little bbq and cake, ice cream and presents.  Palmer is so lucky to have so many people in her life that love her so much.  She has great family on both sides and received lots of happy birthday wishes from friends and family.  The party was fun, except that Palmer insists on getting her beauty sleep and got a little grumpy by the time we got her to bed that night.

The goodies.

By the time that it was time for singing and cake she was getting pretty tired and ready to be done with the festivities.

She started out a little tentatively, as seems to be the norm in this situation.

She slowly decided it was kinda fun to dig into the cake.

Clapping - you can see some cake flying off her hands.

Mmmmmm

Inspecting the cake from all sides.

After she'd eaten all she wanted she decided it was time to sit on the cake.

That is a cute messy birthday girl.

I am not sure how to sum up the last year except to say that it has been wonderful.  This little girl has brought more joy into my life than I ever thought possible.

Palmer is definitely a serious little Lyman.  Most people probably think she's just serious and mean, which is what everyone has always thought about my siblings and me upon meeting us.  She just stares at people with the most straight face most of the time.  At home we get to see the silly and fun side of her.  She squeals and giggles and teases.  She saves her real personality for the people she really trusts.  That's a definite Lyman trait.

For Christmas my parents told us they were going to rent a cabin at Zion National Park in June for all of us to spend a little time together.  The time came and we all headed to Zion.  The cabin was huge and amazing.  Every member of my parents' posterity was there except my oldest nephew, Kolton, who had to work.  We had such a fun time doing so many fun activities and just spending time together.  I sure love my family.

This is not the best picture, but she didn't keep the hat on for long so this is as good as it gets.  This was on the 4th of July as we sat and watched the parade.  Nobody does the 4th like Blanding - love it!

She is the literal definition of a nuisance these days.  She gets into EVERYTHING, especially if it's something she should stay away from.  She pulls herself up on everything and makes mess after mess after mess.  She jabbers all day long, but she has yet to start forming words.  She does say "mama" and "dada" but not on demand most of the time.  One day I was trying to get her to say "grandpa" and it seemed like she said it a couple of times...not sure if it was a fluke or not.

Palmer had a couple of weeks where she started fighting sleep big time.  She would scream and cry every time we would put her down for a nap or at bedtime, and sometimes the crying would last quite a while.  It was rough, because she had become such a good sleeper.  Luckily that phase ended and she's back to going down without much of a peep.  She still takes two naps a day, usually a little less than 1 1/2 hours each.  Yesterday she took a 2 1/2 hour nap, which is very rare for her.  She is sleeping about 12 hours a night.  She was really fluctuating on what time she would wake up in the mornings, but she's back to waking up around 7:00 most days.  BUT today she slept until 9:05!!!  What the heck?!  It was so great.  I went in two different times to make sure she was breathing.  She woke up all kinds of happy.  I'm pretty sure she's in the thick of teething and that's probably the reason for the extra sleep yesterday and today.  I'll take it.

On the note of teething, she has been a bit of a beast off and on for the past week.  She will just get upset out of nowhere and start screaming or crying.  It usually passes after a half hour or so and she'll go back to being ok.  I really hope those teeth pop out soon.  You can see that the top middle two are just trying to bust through.

She does a legitimate crawl now, except when she's really in a hurry; then she'll drop down to the army crawl because she is so much faster that way.  She absolutely loves to climb up the stairs so I follow right behind her up the stairs a few times a day.  She's not interested in walking still.  She has good enough balance that she could for sure take some steps, but any time we try to let go of her hands she just sits right down.  She's not having it.

She LOVES the dogs!  She giggles when she sees them.  She gives all her food to them.  She got bit by Ellie for the first time the other day.  She's got two little gashes right above her eyebrow.  I'm actually surprised it didn't happen sooner and I'm sure it will happen again.  She was torturing Ellie - tugging and tugging at her ears and tail and trying to grab her eyes and mouth.  I kept moving Ellie away from Palmer, and Palmer away from Ellie, but they kept finding each other.  Ellie wasn't smart enough to just walk away so she ended up losing her patience and snapping at Palmer.  Palmer was pretty sad obviously, and I was sad for her.  But to say that she's learned her lesson would not be true.  She has continued to torment the dogs since the incident and I have continued to try to keep them away from her as much as possible.

She can rock a pretty sweet mohawk.  She's got lots of hair on top in the middle and she's got a good patch of hair in the back of her head.  Josh and I named it the "mullethawk" and decided that instead of "business in the front, party in back" like a regular mullet, she just likes to party all around.

She has become a very finicky little eater, which is so sad for me because she's been such a good eater for the most part up until now.  It's completely hit or miss at mealtime these days...you never know when she'll eat or what she'll eat.  She loves to bat at the spoon and send the food flying, but even more than that she loves to open her mouth for a bite like a sweet little angel and then as soon as it's all in her mouth she lets it dribble down her chin.  The dogs stand there and beg for food and she loves to pull bites out of her mouth and feed them to the dogs.  She'll eat a decent amount about once a day and there's no telling which meal it will be.  She is totally loving fruit these days and that is something I can usually get her to eat, any and all kinds of fruit.  She also still loves yogurt.  She'll almost always eat my mom's homemade whole wheat bread; and who can blame her - it's honestly the best bread in the universe.

Letting her feed herself ends up in a huge mess, but she makes one darn cute mess.

As soon as she turned one I started giving her cow's milk.  She didn't hate it but was pretty skeptical with it for the first two or three days.  Now she just loves it and drinks it all day long.

She is a complete mama's girl.  If I'm not visible she's fine with anyone, but if I'm around and I hand her off to anyone else she usually fights and whines to get back to me.  A lot of the time she gets over that pretty quickly and will be fine with others, unless she's in a really bad mood.

Little Miss P-Tay is so loved by her cousins.  And she loves them back.  She squeals and giggles when they come around and loves to follow them around the house.  This little girl makes every day fun.  She's my best buddy and I love being her mom.  Happy first birthday to my favorite girl in the world!

Not a good picture, but this was taken on her birthday.  She got this doll from Taylor's parents and she likes it quite a bit.  She likes to give loves to the doll and bite its head and nose.

I could not get her to look at the camera to get a good birthday picture so this is what you get.
Oops - when I saved this post a couple of days ago, I forgot to include her stats. Maybe that's because I'm a bad mom and can't really remember them very well. At her one year check-up she weighed 18 pounds and some ounces...I'm thinking it was 18 pounds 10 ounces, but I may be wrong. I know she was right around the 20th percentile for weight. Her height was a little over 28 inches, which was also about the 20th percentile. I don't know how big her head was, but I do know that it was the 80th percentile! Love this girl!