Happy Birthday, Baby!

Violet celebrated her first birthday today! Despite what you see here, the day did not include any cake. We offered her her first birthday cake a few weeks ago, intending to use a "cake smash" shot in her party invitations, and to our surprise - she hated it.

We presented her with the cake on a Saturday afternoon, expecting her to dive right in. Though she hadn't ever eaten anything processed, (or anything including sugar, or dairy, or food coloring . . .) she's been willing to try every fruit and vegetable we've presented her with, and eggplant and cucumber are just about that only things she turns her nose up at entirely. So we thought she'd be all for the new flavors and textures of the cake. Hardly. She dipped a tentative finger in the icing, tasted it, and burst into tears. We encouraged her just to play with it, but she wasn't interested in that, either.

Eric captioned this shot It's Not Vegetables :

Obviously we'd never intended to use her birthday cake to torture her, so we decided to call it quits. Before taking it away, though, Eric offered her a couple of spoons. Utensils made all the difference; while she never attempted to eat any more of the cake, she entertained herself and both of us for some time tearing it apart.

It wasn't until we plopped her into the bath and started washing all that pink icing off that we could see she'd broken out in hives. No telling what caused them - there were countless ingredients in that cake and icing she'd never been exposed to - but they disappeared within an hour or so, without any further effects.

So when considering what to offer her for dessert on her actual birthday, it was easy to rule out the traditional cake. We went with a huckleberry cheesecake instead, and while she seemed to enjoy a few bites of that, she certainly wasn't smitten. Maybe her sweet tooth won't come in for a few years.

It's hard to believe she's already a year old. Happy Birthday, big girl. And many, many more.

(To see the whole set of Violet's cake smash photos, click on the photo of her crawling away -through the cake - above.)