Just when you thought the birthday post was over...
With Kai's party two days before his birthday, I didn't want the actual day to feel like a total letdown. So we did little things to make it special.
I snapped this shot of Kai first thing in the morning to document what he looked like as a brand-spanking-new three year old.
At Kai's request we ate pumpkin pancakes for breakfast. Then continued the fun by having two of Kai's little buddies over for a "birthday play date" (which is like a normal play date, but on your birthday...and you get to eat leftover cupcakes from your party after lunch).
Kai insisted that we light a candle and sing him happy birthday. It was finally his actual birthday, after all.
For dinner, I told Kai he could choose a restaurant (mainly because I wanted to get out of cooking and doing dishes). My plan totally backfired when he chose Chuck E. Cheese's. Gross. But what the birthday boy wants, the birthday boy gets. Luckily we have good friends who we roped into coming with us (Do it for Kai!).
To Yo's chagrin, I even insisted that we buy the overpriced Chuck E. Cheese's cake for Kai. It was his (altogether now!) actual birthday, after all. Which meant that we aslo had to sing Happy Birthday to Kai for the umpteenth time. Just look at his face, it never gets old!
...or so I've been told at least a dozen times today by my three-year-old. Apparently even Kai has gotten the memo that three is kind of big time. I've definitely been feeling like this is officially the end to Kai's baby/toddler phase. Just look at the difference a year makes:
It's a little bittersweet seeing my baby growing-up before my eyes. Sometimes I look at Kai and this little guy still flashes through my mind:
But today I don't want to dwell on the baby I've learned to let go of, or the big boy that Kai is soon to become. I want to celebrate Kai's three-ness. And celebrate we did! We had a birthday with some of Kai's closest friends on Monday a day of celebrations on his actual birthday on Wednesday and a little celebration with his class on Thursday.
Here are some pictures from his truck-themed birthday party on Monday:
Since we scaled back on the size of the party, I decided to splurge and get the kids a happy meal. It was totally worth it. The kids were happy and actually ate and facilitating the meal and clean-up was a breeze. In line with the truck them, I got each of the kids little hard hats in lieu of party hats and embellished them with each child's first initial.
I opted for cupcakes this year instead of decorating a whole cake. I got cute truck cupcake liners and toppers (again from Amazon) and dipped the cupcakes in crushed Oreo cookies that looked like dirt.
The morning of the party Kai was all up in my biz while I was trying to get things set-up. He (understandably) wanted to touch everything. When I had to tell him for the umpteenth time to keep his hands off of the cupcakes while I was trying to arrange them on the cake stands, he said in his most exasperated tone, "Mommy, stop organizing them! Cupcakes are for eating not for organizing!"
He was much happier once his friends started arriving and he was finally allowed to touch everything. Here are a few pictures of the party attendants:
The kids played and jumped in the bounce house.
Then we had lunch:
Then the kids played and bounced some more:
We sang happy birthday to Kai:
Chowed down on cupcakes:
And then, when the kids were properly revved up on sugar (and clearly over the bounce house)...
...we sent them home with more sugary treats...just in time for their naps.
It was fun. It was tiring. It was so worth it to see this birthday boy looking so happy!
I know that everyone (myself included) is over Halloween. Back in the day, Halloween was a pretty low key holiday. We'd dress up in our costumes (often homemade) and have little parties at school and then my parents would take us around the neighborhood for some trick or treating at night.
These days between the pumpkin patches, adult parties, kid parties, school parties, church parties, trunk-or-treating and trick or treating, Halloween seems to take up the whole month of October.
A week later and I still feel like I am sugar crashing.
So if you're like me, the last thing you want to read is yet another blog post about Halloween. That being said, here is a brief (mostly photographic) synopsis of how we spent the month of October:
Lemos Farm
It being the first time I had been to Lemos I wasn't really blown away.... but that's because we had never taken Kai to one of the other, local pumpkin patches either. After going to a few of those, I, too, was singing Lemos praises.
$15 for an all-access/all day pass was a deal compared to the $9 it cost for just one hour of jumping in the bounce houses at the local place.
Not to mention the $4 it would have cost us to let Kai drive this tractor around in a circle 3 times. (Instead we let him sit in it for free...until a paying customer came along and we got the boot.)
The only thing that was free in the entire place was this lame wagon... and it didn't even roll.
Kai's preschool had a little Halloween party on the Tuesday before Halloween. It started off with a costume parade:
It was really cute until Kai got 5 feet passed me and then had a total conniption. Apparently he really wanted his mommy and didn't get the memo that I would be joining him in his classroom 30 seconds later. I found myself trying to wind my way through a mob of very enthusiastic parents following the parade taking pictures paparazzi style to console Kai. It was quite a scene. I wish I had caught that action on camera.
We also attended our ward Halloween party at church. While I volunteered in the pumpkin bowling room, Yo took Kai around to the games:
That same night, I had a party of my own to attend, the Jacobs' annual costume party. This year's theme was only the good die young. As usual, I could care less about the theme, I was just proud of myself for coming up with a costume. Period. And for some reason I had my heart set on being crazy Britney. (Maybe because I owned everything to make this costume happen, but a cheap bald cap. Or maybe because it was just funny.) Since CraCra Britney is no longer...and she was my favorite Britney... I figured that it worked within the theme. Close enough.
I studied photos to make sure that my outfit was spot on. Check out the likeness...
We finally got around to carving pumpkins the day before Halloween.
We had a few friends over for dinner and Stan's donuts before sending the kids out trick-or-treating while I stayed behind to hang out with Ari and a few other stragglers who helped me pass out candy.
B is the Pooh to Kai's Tigger
My favorite shot of the night...
Where was Ari during all of this?
Now let's move on to November--Kai's birthday, Thanksgiving in Florida, turkey sandwiches, pumpkin pie... bring it on!
Kai has been in preschool for a couple of months now. He seems to be
happy every time I go to pick him up, so I've assumed it's been going
well enough, but it's hard to get many details from a 2-year-old.
One
day when Kai was feeling exceptionally chatty I learned that he has a
friend named Kashum who likes to take his trucks away, that they learned
about rockets, and that some of the other kids in the class cry...a
lot.
But aside from these few gems of information, I
have no idea how Kai spends his 3 hours at preschool 2 days a week, so I
was really looking forward to my conference with his teachers to find
out.
The meeting went well. Over all it sounds like
Kai is adjusting well to the structure of the classroom environment. In
general he is a happy and well-mannered kid. Apparently he only had one
epic meltdown since the school year began (not a bad track record
considering the number of epic meltdowns he's had at home in the same
amount of time). So all-in-all things were going more or less as I
assumed they would.
When I asked the teacher about how
Kai was doing socially and if he had made any special friends in class,
his teacher told me that Kai had taken a particular liking to a little
girl named Tamara. She laughed as she described how Kai liked to stroke
her hair and tell her she is pretty and hug her all the time. Apparently
Tamara was not very happy about this for the first few weeks of school,
but has since learned to live with Kai's displays of affection.
This
is the first I had heard about any of this. When I apologized, Kai's
teacher laughed and said that Kai was very sweet about it and she (and
the little girl's mom) thought his crush was adorable. Still I went home
and decided it was time to have a talk with Kai about keeping his hands
to himself. It went like this:
Me: Kai, is there a girl named to Tamara in your class?
Kai: Uh-huh
Me: Do you sometimes hug Tamara and touch her hair?
Kai: Yeah...a lot.
Me: Kai, does Tamara like it when you hug her and touch her hair?
Kai: Umm... I don't know.
Me:
Buddy, I love that you are friendly, but you need to work on keeping
your hands to yourself, especially if someone doesn't want you to touch
them or hug them. I understand that you like Tamara, but it doesn't
sound like she wants to be hugged or touched so you need to stop."
Kai: But Mommy, I love her.
He said this with such sincerity that I almost felt bad when I laughed.
Poor
Kai! In his short life he has already demonstrated his weakness for the
pretty girls. I realized that I was in for trouble the day that he
spontaneously started stroking the hair of a beautiful and several years
older redhead in the middle of sacrament meeting one Sunday and sweetly
told her, "You're so beautiful," again and again, while the girl's
mother and I stifled our fits of laughter. (Oh Hayley, how Kai misses
his Avy!)
I'm not sure how his love of the
ladies is going to play out in the years to come, but I'm glad that for
now I still get to be his leading lady despite his puppy crushes because
I have a feeling my reign will be short-lived. So for now, I for one am
taking as many hugs from this cutie pie as I can get. Tamara doesn't
know what she's missing...and I'm ok with that.
