William's birthday

Our baby turned 2 on July 16. It sounds a little surreal and we shouldn't call him our baby anymore, but it feels like it was just yesterday I was holding this little peanut in my arms all fragile and squishy.

Too say that he is not fragile anymore would be a huge understatement. He is skinny as a bean but solid like a rock. He is definitely a fun kid to raise with all his idiosyncrasies (thumb sucking-hair puller, bounce rather than walk-er, throwing machine, king of mischief).

Pretty much everything we did to celebrate his birthday was decided on a whim, but it all turned out great. 

A few days before William's birthday we took Josh to the Dollar Store and let him choose a present for his brother. The following days he could barely wait to give William his present. It was so cute to see how anxious he was! At last the morning of William's birthday arrived and we let Joshua offer his present (a set of cars of course).

Then we went and picked up Grandma's present at the store. It was just too good to be true for this little guy. I could see his excitement build up as I assembled the giant basket ball hoop and he realized it wasn't just a box with a cool picture on it!

William's simplified version of happiness: throwing assortments of items into a basket ball hoop.

Later that afternoon we drove to a small kid entertainment center called Jumping Jordy where we met our friends the Conkeys and the Petersens. We'd never been there but I could tell from the description it would be heaven for our little kangaroo. And it was a big hit with all the kids (after a little warming up).

We had dinner at Sweet Tomatoes with Em (that's what William calls Emily), Don and Sam.

I had spent the day attempting to make a cake for the occasion but I kept failing. One cake was too thin, another one got completely destroyed when I removed it from the pan, the last cake was still cooking when we left for Jumping Jordy so I was sure it would be a fail. But it was too late to take care of it when we came home that night so William went to bed without blowing his candles.

The next day we improvised a little birthday party with neighbors and friends in Newton Court (I should mention that we changed apartments in May, we now live in a different complex but only 2min from the previous one). We filled up the pool and took the basket ball hoop outside, and William finally got to blow his candles (well the wind did). I love that it is so easy to get together with neighbors where we live. We all had a great time hanging out with our friends.

I was writing things about William in my journal that day and decided to ask him and Josh to answer a few questions and videotape them. I think it turned out pretty cute:

I should also say that this big guy has been using the potty for a couple of months now. He was only doing it for fun at first (although he actually did something pretty much every time), but we just recently started being serious about it and he's doing great-- no accidents today! Keeping our fingers crossed...

Happy birthday to our Bungalow Bill!