Annie is 1!!!

The Indian tradition for a first birthday is to have a HUGE celebration. My maid kept telling me that I needed to invite "all the childrens in the area" and that she would bake "many cakes" Well, I don't know all the "childrens" so I kept telling her that we would probably just do a small party with our kids. She and our driver came to me on the morning of Annie's birthday and asked if we had rented the party hall in our clubhouse for the party. I told her no that I didn't think we needed a party hall for our kids, we could just have a little party in our living room. They then asked if it was OK to decorate our living room for Annie. I told them that was fine, I was sure Annie would like that. I wish I had videoed them doing it. They were like kids in a candy store all excited. The driver asked if he could go buy more balloons because the package I had boughten didn't have enough in it. I gave him 100 rupees and told him that was fine and if they needed any other decorations to go ahead and buy them. About 100 balloons and alot of streamers later, they were finished decorating. They had even found some of the water balloons that ended up on our shipment over here and were blowing them up. I got a headache just watching our driver blow up balloons. Baby also brought Annie a gift that morning. Vijay brought one that night.

After eating cake she opened her presents from our family. She got a really cute swing that we had to hang in the garage, and a walker that turns into a little scooter bike. Ethan was so upset because he didn't have a present to give to her from him. He went upstairs and got wrapped up his football and gave it to her. Now that is a true gift!

A funny comment on the cake. Here, people DO NOT WASTE FOOD at all!! We gave Annie the cake and Maddie pulled a "Kelli". LOL She was crying saying that she wanted to eat some cake and that Annie would eat it all. I assured her that Annie couldn't eat a whole 9 X 13 cake. When Annie finished, we cut off a piece for everyone to have some. There was still quite a bit of cake left, and I was just going to throw it away because it was all torn apart from Annie. Well, in the madness of cleaning Annie up and getting everyone else in bed that night, I left the cake sitting out. When Baby came the next morning, she got out the left over frosting and was going to fix the cake so that we could have it for dessert the next night. She frosted part of the cake and ran out of frosting. I told her not to worry about it because Annie could just eat the other part again. The kids each had another piece of cake, and I had to hurry and throw the rest out so she wouldn't try to fix the cake again today.