Five! A Day Later...

Blowing out the candles...had a little trouble (there may have been a "little" spit on the cake!)

The Thomas "paint-your-own" cars after their paint jobs (loving the smiley faces)

Happily painting

Recycling Cars - just especially in honor of my eco-friendly husband! ;)

Digging in

Admiring Culdee

Five fingers

Well, as usual I'm a day late and a dollar short. Sorry about that. Things have been a little busy around here with mother-in-laws visiting, school, teeball, visits here and there, etc. Yesterday was Josiah's fifth birthday...think he had a pretty good one. We started celebrating on Monday, actually, because Josiah declared it his "Last Day to be Four" celebration.

What a kid, I tell you! He leapt out of bed yesterday morning and brought his wrapped presents from my room out to the living room. I insisted that he eat a good breakfast before the arduous task of present-opening, so he consented to a waffle, which I delivered to him with a single candle and a loving rendition of "Happy Birthday". By the time he had wolfed his breakfast down, Donna and Annika were awake and got to watch him tear through his little pile of presents. Thomas trains were present (as always), but this year we also got him a very cool K'Nex set that teaches him how gears work, a K'Nex set that builds several construction vehicles, and Aunt Heidi and Uncle Chad sent him a very cool building set that configures into all sorts of different bridges.

Hans, please hurry home as I thought of myself as construction-oriented, but am having trouble building all of these models, dioramas and bridges! We need some male help. Like I told Donna though, Josiah will see these things built a couple of times and be able to do it himself without instructions. The kid has a photographic, engineering-based memory stick!

Later on, we had Josiah's favorite meal (well, favorite this month anyway): pigs in a blanket with green beans, french fries, fruit and chocolate milk. And much later on, we had his friends Nathan and Noah stop over after supper for some cake and ice cream and to sing to him again.

He and Grandma watched "Madagascar 2" after our guests left, and then finally, a rosy-cheeked and fully-fledged 5-year-old crawled into bed with me to officially review his baby book. We sat and talked about the pictures of him newly born through his first year, about how excited his father and I were to meet him, about what he looked like and acted like, what he liked to play with, who his friends were. It all seems like yesterday that we brought our baby boy home and yet so much has changed, most of all our relationship with him that only seems to get stronger and deeper with time.

Happy Birthday a day late...guess you got three days of birthday wishes Joe!