Caira's First Birthday

Caira, my little girl will be 1 year old next Wednesday.
It's weird because her birth doesn't feel like a year ago.. She has been crawling since about 5.5 months, and took her first steps right around her 10 month birthday. She's walking everywhere now, and doing a great job at it! She loves to climb and is very good at "Simon Says" type games (we don't actually say "Simon "says" but instead say "Everybody... clap/touch your nose etc")
She wiggled her toes this morning, when both her and her brother were sitting on my lap, and we were all inspecting each others wiggly toes lol I was pretty impressed by that!
We practiced blowing out candles today, she did pretty good but Cain helped her with the final touches.

Caira is such a little girl- she still cries and makes pouty faces when we tell her no, she loves to brush her hair and play with shoes, but she is also very independent. She used to follow either Cain or myself everywhere, but now we often find her exploring this on her own. I take them to the mall a lot, to play at the kids place, and even there she goes her own way and does her own thing. I let her do a lot more than I Cain did at this age, probably because Cain just started crawling at almost 12 months old (and she's already walking), but also because she's a quick learner and wants to so everything her brother does anyway.

She has been going backwards off of things for months; it was the first thing we taught her as soon as she began crawling. "Go backwards, Caira!" I can still hear Cain. "Bawads Cawa!" XD
Cain is getting so big too, he's tall enough now that he can get onto our counter high dining set, and inspect everything that we've been storing on there because it was the only lace they couldn't reach.. He jumps up and off of the couch with little effort, and of course, Caira has noticed this too. They were sitting on the futon in our home office after lunch today, watching Nick Jr., when Cain decided he had had enough. He jump/slides off the futon, and walks away. Caira stands up, walks to the edge of the futon and as I yell "BACKWAA..!" she leaps off into the air. Of course her other foot was still on the futon, so there she went- face down on the ground- a ball went flying, I guess she must have landed on it, I reach her just in time to see her get to her knees and look at me with big eyes, gleaming with excitement. Silly girl was fine. Phew!

Her birthday is the 24th. Thanksgiving is the day after, and we're having a party for her in Dayton on the 27th. I think she'll enjoy it a lot more than Cain did his first time! She seems so much older!
I wish I had scheduled a photo session with Memories by Morgan, 'cause I remember Morgan saying that she had yet to photograph a one year old that actually ate their personal cake. I'm pretty sure Caira would destroy it! lol