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On Saturday my parents came up to help celebrate Henry's first birthday in style. Somehow, there ended up being a lot of presents.

We piled them all in front of him and watched as he would pick one up, look at it for a while, then put it back down. The kid who will tear into anything he can get his hands on refused to unwrap his presents. Oh, the irony. I should have strategically placed them around the house so that whenever he happened upon one I could say "No" thus increasing the desire to shred them exponentially. It took him all day to open his presents. He inspected and played with each one which meant after opening four or five of them two and a half hours had gone by and it was time for his nap. Also, the excitement of all of the new goodies seemed to be a little overwhelming. There was a lot of lip-pursing and shaking with excitement going on.

When I mentioned to Dave I was wanting to bake Henry a birthday cake, he suggested a chocolate cake with orange-colored frosting in honor of our being in Salem. For whatever reason, I decided it would be easier to bake an orange-colored cake with chocolate icing. Except I couldn't get the batter orange. No matter how much red and yellow food coloring I added, it kept coming out flesh colored, which was pretty gross looking. I decided to forgo the orange and just added a lot of red. So for his first birthday, Henry got a salmon colored cake with chocolate icing.

Originally it said "Happy Birthday Henry". I bought Betty Crocker's spray-on color, which I had illusions of using to artfully write "Henry", conveniently forgetting that I have absolutely no artistic talent whatsoever. I made the H, E, and N too big and had to squeeze the R and Y on. When I stepped back to admire my work it wasn't legible. If I didn't know I had been trying to write "Henry", I wouldn't have had any clue as to what it said. Dave told me he thought it looked great. Wasn't that sweet of him? I scraped the sprayed-on color off and Dave proceeded to make good use of various colored sprinkles to cover up the mess. He did a great job. After dinner we gave Henry a piece of his cake and he tore right into it.

After the cake, Henry was all over the place. The highlight of the evening was watching him play hide and seek with his grandpa. My dad would hide under a blanket on the floor and Henry would come over and lift it off of him. Once, Henry decided he would peep under the blanket instead of lift it off. My dad jumped a bit, startled to see Henry peering at him from under the blanket, which in turn startled Henry. I could've died from all of the cuteness. I'm really loving the fact that Henry is able to see some of his extended family on a more regular basis, and I think he is too. We need to get all of the grandparents to move closer.