Hey, I'm a whole year old!  Am I too cool or what?

Look at the left margin for older pictures!

First off, we posed for all of the obligatory Easter and first year pictures.  Copyright hawks please note that we bought the rights to reprint the pictures.

So, the days leading up to Mason's first birthday were action-packed!  Being a Spring baby, Mason has a birthday that's often adjacent to Easter (but amazingly, April 15 does not fall on Easter again until 2063!).  Mason tries a few seats, poses with Daddy and Dona, enjoys his first Easter basket, climbs the stairs, reminds Mommy & Daddy that they need to move the stuff out from under the sink and has a simply miserable time with the Easter Bunny.  These two pictures are all of 30 seconds apart.

Now that he's old enough, we can finally put him in the Burley trailer.  Boy, this takes a lot of gear!  So far, we've only taken him to the end of the block, but he was very amused or maybe scared.  He had a huge belly laugh the entire way!

Mason and his friends from playgroup made a trip to the Dallas Arboretum.  Mason the CEO poses with Hailey and takes several team pictures.  Apparently Mommy has been talking up the Bob Revolution stroller. 

There's a whole lot of work going into planning a birthday!  First you have to get balloons and then you have to find the whisk to make a cake.  If you're in Texas in the Spring, you have to get your picture with bluebonnets.  You might also want to plant some mondo grass and unfortunately, you need to get your first haircut.

The party itself was very nice and lots of Mason's playgroup friends came by to wish him well.  He didn't nap in the morning, so he was a little tired and he was definitely overwhelmed with all of the attention he was getting.  But the big news is that HE TOOK HIS FIRST STEPS!  We were offering him some food and instead of crawling over, he took nine whole steps to get it.

As for the party, we had heaps of balloons and Mason loved dragging them around the house.  He plays house with Sam and Luke and is very impressed with the wrapping on one of his gifts.  Sam plays with the balloons while Griffin naps and Shaan has a snack.  Mason delicately eats blueberries off the cake, one at at time.  The very advanced Sofia rides the Hippo.  He steals Hailey's bow and she's not at all pleased and Daddy pontificates about something while Mason eats rocks.