Our beautiful little girl is ONE! She is a FAST crawler and is interested in everything Luke is doing. She began crawling up the stairs.... I didn't know she knew how until I happened to see her halfway up the stairs one day! You can kind of see it in her birthday picture (below), but she fell off the 3rd stair just a couple hours after her professional birthday pictures were taken - instand black eye and huge bump on her forehead! She has taken steps between people, as long as someone is standing waiting to catch her. She says Mama and Dada.... but "Dada" is also the word for several other things, including doggie, baby, and Luke. Each one of those "dada"s has a different sound to it - she definitely thinks she's saying different words. She is cracking everyone up with her personality and she's even starting to show a little temper when things don't go quite her way. In fact, two days before her 1st birthday, she threw her first major tantrum while I was *trying* to visit some friends.... she SCREAMED (no, really, I mean SCREAMED) for well over an hour. In that time, I loaded the kids up, drove back to our house, called my doctor because I thought something was wrong..... and after an hour and 15 minutes or so, she just decided she was done. I couldn't believe it. Oh, sweet Marissa.
Here's Marissa in her birthday shirt:

We made cupcakes for the actual birthday

She wasn't too shy about getting into it.

This is another of Marissa's quirks: she likes to rub whatever she might be eating into her hair.... so, clearly the icing made an interesting look.