What Has Been

I’ve posted completely out of order and want to back up a little bit here by posting about the boy’s birthday party…more than TWO weeks ago.

I had a great time. I am pretty sure they did too and I am so grateful to the friends and family who came long distances and blessed my three boys.

We decided to keep things a little bit simpler this year by doing a joint birthday party. Our reasons were three fold; the most obvious being that their birthdays are close together and it saves time (and money) to plan one event instead of three. Less obvious, was my thinking that it would cut down on gifts (I thought people might possibly take my suggestion to buy one thing for all of three of them as they usually play with the same thing anyway). I was wrong on that one. But it did open my eyes to other advantages regarding gifts. People did buy them each something but they were usually related items which encourages play between them and cuts down on fighting. LOVE THAT. And the least obvious reason was in regard to Ivan. His birthday is so close to Thanksgiving that he has NEVER had a party of his own outside of family. He has never complained about this and I’ve tried to do special things for him regardless, but I wanted him to have that experience and it seemed to work very well.

I made their cakes and kept with the tradition of the cake representing their ages. When my siblings and I were growing up, my mom always made our cakes in the shape of our age. Usually cutting out the number from a wax paper stencil and then frosting it in the color or flavor of our choice. I loved it as a kid, but it’s a lot of work actually, and I discovered (on Owen’s second birthday) that sprinkles did just as well with less effort. So we have done that almost every year since. Each cake was a different flavor: Aron had yellow cake with white icing and multi-colored sprinkles. Ivan had spice cake with cream cheese flavored icing and cinnamon sugar and gold sprinkles. Owen had chocolate cake with chocolate icing and powdered sugar on top. Ivan’s cake was the one I was least confident about, I was afraid I had ruined it in baking and transference from pan, but it got the most positive comments. I’ll definitely do that one again. (There’s a baby shower coming up…)

Party supplies on clearance at Target was a boost for the budget.

It was like Christmas at the house for the next several days. Grandma sent this and it was VERY WELL RECEIVED. Owen had been asking for one for weeks. Score one for Grandma!

Dean has the best grin! Owen surprised me a little with his hosting skills. I heard him thanking people for coming and watched him give hugs and “work the room” a little. I was proud of him, I know it doesn’t come naturally to Kris and I to be hospitable, we like to host but we have to work at making people feel as welcome as we want them to be. Maybe Owen has been watching, or maybe he’s got gifts he didn’t get from us.

After blowing out the little flames, all three boys wanted to lick the frosting off of their candles. Ivan somehow got it into his head that the candles were edible and these last two pictures are both his mistake and the tale end of his reaction to the wax in his teeth. I was a little taken aback by this at the time, but I find it down right hilarious two weeks later.

Though it worked very, very well, it may be our last of this type of party. We’ll see where we are next year, but Owen is shifting into the sleep-over category and I think that will be a good idea for next year. It is too early to say for sure though.