Pink Ears, a Tutu, and a Joyful Easter!

First off, I would like to apologize for not getting this post up sooner! It has been a rather crazy (in a fun and exciting way!) week for us, plus life is rarely easy to keep according to plan with a baby! I hope you all had a wonderful Easter!! We certainly did here! Carly makes holidays so much fun and so stinkin' ADORABLE. It felt like Christmas Eve excitement on Saturday night, as I was setting up Carly's Easter basket goodies, putting out a few last minute decorations, and planning my Easter meal :)

We had so much fun picking out the goodies for Carly's first Easter basket. I am proud of myself for not going crazy overboard, but I feel like we had some good ideas! For her basket we chose 'The Story of Easter' book, a Care Bears DVD, an adorable sippy cup with a bunny, a little flower clip for her headbands, the CUTEST pink & white Seersucker Halter Romper from Gymboree, along with the matching Seersucker Sunhat, some adorable bunny ears, and of course her 'My First Easter' bib! Then we ended up in Babies R Us (where it's impossible to not buy a few things for our angel), which is where we got the two things that didn't fit in her basket: the VTech Sit-to-Stand Learning Walker and the VTech Spin 'n' Learn Top. We lucked out and Babies R Us was running a buy one, get one free on VTech toys! So far, both of these have been huge hits with Carly Button! I wanted to get something she could pull herself up on because......she pulled herself up last Friday!!!! She has only done it once more since then, but I knew that she would start doing this a lot very soon so that's what prompted getting her the Sit-to-Stand Walker. We push it up against our couch so she can stand at it (with us right there of course!) and the wheels won't roll.

My busy-mom-friendly Easter dinner consisted of homemade hummus and pita chips to snack on during the afternoon...

...then for dinner we had roast pork (pre-seasoned & easy-peasy), a carrot salad (recipe here, which was a new recipe that I tried and turned out pretty good), and some rosemary & olive oil sourdough bread (one of my all-time favorites). For dessert (and for my husbands office), I made some traditional Easter M&M cookies- with some help from my baking partner :)

Always a favorite!

Okay....enough with the food and boring things right? You are all waiting to see what Carly Button wore, and I just can't keep it from you any longer....

I know. The ears! The tutu dress! The hands folded.....those eyes....it's just too much to handle. I know :) Notice her adoring followers in the background? Well actually they are adoring the dinner we just sat down to enjoy (my husband snuck them each a piece of pork...and he blames me for their rounded physique, uh huh).

It is nearly impossible to catch her holding still while feeding her, let alone when it's a favorite like avocado! So I apologize for the super blurry picture. Last week I made some brown rice cereal using Trader Joe's Brown Basmati Rice because I had bypassed the whole rice cereal phase in the beginning and quite frankly I was just curious to see what all the fuss about rice cereal was about. So I made it....and it was so bland compared to what Carly has been eating for the last month & a half that I just couldn't make her eat it. If anyone has made a batch of homemade rice cereal before, you know it makes A LOT. So in attempt to not be wasteful, I got slightly creative! I mixed half the batch with apple puree and the other half with avocado puree. How did I choose those flavors? Well I've seen apple flavored rice cereal in the stores before so I figured it might be a popular flavor (not so much for Carly....more on that later). As for avocado, well I love avocado on everything including things like tacos which have rice in them (when I make them), so I figured it was a combination that made sense! She loves loves avocado anything, so it was a win! Anyways, enough on that tangent..back to Easter cuteness!

Carly's dress is from Target, one that I had been eyeing since it hit the racks a few months ago! Her bow that is clipped onto her ears was an Easter gift from her Auntie :) I found my navy and white striped, fitted maxi dress at a local boutique. I paired my dress with a pink skinny belt, little daisy stud earrings (gone are the days of my cute hoops or anything that dangles, I'm sure you can guess why!) and my long pearls (mostly to give Carly something to keep her interest during pictures, lol!).

I barely had time to set the basket down in front of her and snap a picure before she dove right in! I think Christmas taught her well.

My little beauty queen :)

I hope your Easter was as fun and cute as ours! Carly ended the day tuckered out and cuddling with her new handmade bunny from Grandma.

 Now it's time for Mama to enjoy some quiet time cleaning up the day and enjoying one of her favorite treats of Easter....

Easter just isn't complete without my little sugar-y friends. I might have eaten the whole pack, but we'll never know for sure....