Happy Birthday Buddy!

Monday was Cooper's actual birthday.  We did our traditional celebrate-on-the-actual-day-as-a-family and had cupcakes with brown and orange sprinkles (thank you Grammy!).  Cooper was really happy to have a candle and frosting... the cake part seemed rather superfluous.  

 The party, which needed a chocolate T-rex Buddy cake (from the Dinosaur Train PBS show), was held on Friday.  Seriously, dinosaurs and trains in one show- GENIUS!  Anyway, the weather all week has been so lovely, and then around 4pm as I'm setting up the tables outside with food and drinks, I could feel the wind switch and knew rain was coming.  Great.  We had 9 adults and 9 kiddos coming over for an outdoor party.  9 kids aged 6 and under....  but the kids didn't seem to mind the change in venue, and Cooper loved the cake so the only complaining was from the parents trying to keep their children using "inside voices."  Not one of us won that battle, which was rather nice when all was said and done.

 A family just moved into the neighborhood with three kiddos.  We've been talking about their coming to the kids for a few weeks now and Cooper was desperate for the "new friends" to be at the party.  They arrived in town on Thursday from the US, so the kids were jet lagging, exhausted, and had no idea how to sing "Happy Birthday" using the South African words.  The whole thing made me laugh because between the singing and trying to keep Harper away from the massive thing of orange frosting on a very shinny plate for the last few hours, I just wanted it all to be over so the cake could be eaten!

 And in the middle of it all was my boy, complete (as only a boy's birthday could be), with a rather massive bruise across his forehead.  It just wouldn't be a birthday celebration without some bruising and in true Cooper fashion, he held to tradition- four years running, an impressive record for one so small.

At the end of it, with so little room and no where to play, we turned on a Dinosaur Train episode so that the adults could catch a little more time chatting... I mean, so that the kids could have more time before bed!