bella turns 1!

I can't believe it! Today was Bella's - our nanny's daughter - first birthday! She is a whole year old! And that means Charli is almost a whole year old! And that means... *sniff* she's growing up! Waaaah!

Well, we were supposed to meet Bella and her family (including visiting aunt and grandmother) at the zoo, to hang out with the goats and whatever. Unfortunately, Charli napped late, and then traffic was terrible, and it was raining. This all conspired to make us pretty late to the zoo, so that when we got there, the ticket lady actually discouraged us from buying tickets (she was practically refusing to sell them to us). It was about an hour til closing time, and since it was raining, she thought they might have put a lot of the animals away, and she really didn't want us to spend all the entry fee money and then maybe not see any animals. However, although she warned us quite strongly that any money we spent would be generally wasted, she was not willing to let us in for free. We dithered around for a bit and then tried to get someone else to let us in free which also didn't work, but she did tell us that at 4:30 you can get in free every day. Of course, that didn't really do us any good, since the petting zoo closes at 4:30, and that's all we came to see, but then it would have been even more stupid for us to have bought tickets. We ended up spending the intervening 15 minutes very well - hanging out in the pumpkin patch and taking lots of pictures until we could go in for free. We met up with Bella and family on the way out. *sigh*

After that we went over to Bella's house for party and cake! Charli likes cake! We had a lovely dinner and hung out and met a bunch of Bella's (and Nina and Dex's) other friends. Dex's family is really nice, and everything went really well.

Here's Charli hanging with her homie. BFF!