Valentine's Day--Tessa's BDay Part 1

We had quite the day of love around here.  Leading up to Valentine's, I made fabric envelopes to tie around each of our dinner chairs.  We all loved getting and giving love notes.  I don't know how many times I wrote (per Bryce's dictation), "I love you so much" on tiny scraps of paper.  Sometimes there were coupons for Free Baby-sitting, Free Reading a book or Free Anything You Want...which was from Caden but would have been awesome from Chad.  I've saved all of our notes and look forward to reading them again next Valentine's.

After opening family Valentines and a breakfast of strawberry cream cheese French toast (my favorite!) we headed to a Gourley family party including a trip to the park and pizza at Grandma and Grandpa's.  We determined a Gourley gene test at the park--the spinning saucer.  Those with true Gourley genes fell down after only 3 circles while those without Gourley blood had a much higher stamina.  One (very Gourley) nephew actually walked off the ledge after his 3 turns.

We followed with birthday cake to celebrate Tessa's first birthday.

Plenty of love to go around:

Tessa is a Grandpa's girl.  She follows him everywhere when he's around.  Looking at this picture of him singing Happy Birthday, the feeling seems reciprocated.

One of my favorite moments of the party was this...Tessa double fisting her cheesy garlic bread into her mouth so she'd be able to open presents.  That's my girl.

That night we took the kids to see a movie.  The boys had fun while Chad and I suffered through entertaining Tessa.  After dinner and bath, we were all ready for bed.

I'm certainly happy to celebrate Valentine's Day with these love bugs.