Reagan and Sera are one year old!  Can you believe it?  Yeah, me neither.  Does anyone even read this blog anymore?  Well, if you are reading, here's a treat for ya - video of the girls "enjoying" their first birthday cake.  Ah, the things you can get away with as a baby!


 

Jonny turned five today.  I absolutely cannot believe that my baby is five.  And he is becoming just the coolest little kid.  He's still very sweet and loving... he gives lots of hugs and kisses, and we have this conversation often:

Jonny: "Mommy, I want to tell you something."

Me: "What?"

Jonny: "I like you.  And I love you.  And I like you."

Me: "I like you, and I love you, and I like you, too."

Followed by a gigantic hug, of course.

He loves riding his bike with the neighbor kids, zipping up and down the street as fast as he can.  He gets along well with everyone, and my neighbors all praise him as the "quiet one," which is funny, because the child will talk your ear off if you let him.  But he does play pretty quietly overall, and that's usually what they're getting at.  Although definitely all boy, he's not as rough-and-tumble as some of the other boys on our street.

His favorite movie is Cars, or "Talking Cars," as he calls it.  He and Gracie watch it every night, with only the occasional deviation.  He has pretty much the entire collection of the die-cast Cars characters, and he and his friends will sit and play with them for hours at a time.

He loves to be outside.  The hardest part of any given day is getting him to come in the house for any reason, but especially at night.  His eyebrows and a good portion of his hair have been bleached blonde by the sun.

His insanely blue eyes have only become more startling as he's gotten older, and he likes to put blue gel in his mohawk to match them.

He's very excited to start kindergarten this year, and even more excited that Gracie will be in the same class.  He talks about school often, and has been contemplating whether he'd like to have a Cars, Spiderman or SpongeBob lunchbox.

He is a fantastic big brother to Gracie and Levi.  He's especially protective of Levi, and keeps him away from the street and generally out of harm's way.  He's been even more interested in Levi now that he can walk and is talking a little.  He loves it when Levi says something new, and often translates his toddler babble into something more meaningful that only he understands.  He's gotten a bit possessive of his toys, but manages to share most of the time.  He definitely has the typical "I can pick on my sister but nobody else had better" attitude when it comes to Gracie.  Sometimes he truly just torments her, but the vast majority of the time they get along better than any other siblings I've seen.

He still eats almost anything you put in front of him.  His most recent new food was crawfish.  Within the first three he was pinching the tails and sucking the heads as if he'd been born in New Orleans. 

He can carry on conversations that confound me most of the time, and is insatiably curious.

Tonight he curled up beside me on the sofa and we watched Cars together.  Before he drifted off to sleep, he promised he'd be my baby boy forever.  Part of me wishes that were possible, but it's been so amazing watching him grow into the incredible little being that he's become... most of me just can't wait to see what's next.

The party was a success, but I still can't believe that Jonny will be five tomorrow.  I've been feeling pretty funky and sad about it; much the way I felt when he turned one.  He's quite excited about being five, though, and is already talking about what he wants to do when he turns six.  Whoa!  Slow down there, buddy!  Let's take one year at a time, ok?

The kids all had a blast with the water stuff.  Funny - the baby pool/sprinkler thing was the most popular!  They got a kick out of their goodie bag loot, with the "spider slime" being the biggest hit.  They figured out that if you put it in the water, it gets even slimier.  Lovely!

Jonny was hilarious.  Dad brought him over just before 1:00, and the first thing out of his mouth was, "I am ready to PAR-TAY!" complete with a little dance.  I already had all the Spiderman decorations up when he got there - he let out a big squeal when he saw them.

I was running around too much to take many photos, but I did get some.  Hopefully Sharon and my dad will send me some, too - they took a lot.


Click to see more!

I did manage to capture a few cute videos...

Lots of kids; one cake
The precursor to this video is that my mom always insists on cutting cake with dental floss, because it doesn't mess up the icing like a knife does.  This is true, but generally a bunch of kids don't care if the icing is messed up (and really, do adults?)  In my opinion it takes longer to cut cake with dental floss, and you still have to get a serving utensil to actually serve the cake, so why not just use a knife in the first place?

Anyway, we had this whole discussion, and she still insisted on using the dental floss, but then decided she needed to find a knife to cut some of the pieces, leaving one cake surrounded by several 3-5 year olds.  Did you really think they wouldn't touch the cake?



Car chase
Sharon's oldest, Christopher was playing with Levi's remote-control car.  Levi had fun trying to chase it down.  The extreme close-up at the end is one of our neighbor's kids, Evan.




As I was cleaning up later in the evening, I discovered that I'd forgotten to put out the potato salad.  I called my mom to laugh about it, and my dad ended up coming back over to have another burger and some "tater salad."  He took some home, and I brought the rest of it to work today.

Overall, it was a really good day.  Tomorrow is Jonny's actual birthday, so we'll do dinner over at mom and dad's in the evening.  I'm taking the day off work, and Lee doesn't have to be at work until 4pm, so we'll do something with him tomorrow, but I haven't figured out what yet.  Probably the zoo or COSI.

Prep for Jonny's birthday party is well underway.  All the veggies that need chopping are chopped for the veggie tray, onions are nearly carmelized for the french onion dip (no, I don't make it using a little packet of powdered soup!), potatoes for the potato salad are cooling, freezer pickles are done and sitting on the counter (I usually like to make them a couple days ahead of time, but it was a last-minute decision, and they should still have plenty of time to be well flavored), LTO is sliced and ready to go for the condiment tray, and I'm about to season the meat for the burgers.

Still need to:

- make the burger patties
- cut the chicken breasts down for grilling
- make the potato salad
- make the french onion dip
- make some sort of dip for the veggies... garlic and herb, maybe?
- clean up and put the kitchen back together

I bought a ridiculous amount of Spiderman decorations and other fun stuff at the party supply store earlier today.  Since Jonny and Gracie are spending the night at my mom and dad's, we'll do the decorating in the morning. 

Tomorrow morning, need to:

- go pick up the balloons and ice
- ice down the beverages
- decorate
- fill the pool
- setup the slip 'n slide
- fill the water balloons
- put together the goodie bags (might do that tonight)
- assemble the veggie tray
- assemble the condiment tray

We'll start grilling around 1:00, when the party is scheduled to start.  No one ever shows up on time, so I'm not worried about having food ready as soon as people arrive.

Hmm... I'm sure these lists are missing a few things.  Maybe not.  Guess I'll find out!

Edit: Yep - I was forgetting something.  Ice!!  Need lots of ice!