TWO!

Alright, now for the picture recap of the Baby's birthday.

We started the day with a gift of course. We had a few things to give him, and did not want to overload him with multiple presents at once. So we spaced them out over the course of the day. The Little Dude thought it would be fun to hide the first present, so we tucked it behind the pillow on this chair. As you can see, the Baby is quite triumphant in his discovery.

The Little Dude was also a very eager and helpful co-unwrapper. Ahem. That's what big brothers are for right?

On a side note, it was interesting to watch him learn/deal with/negotiate his feelings about it being his brother's birthday and not his own. I'm a bit of an old-fashioned parent this way, in that I don't really think its necessary to get the other child a sort of 'consolation prize' present on their siblings birthday. I think that even at the developmentally self-centred age of four, it is important for them to learn that not everything is about them. We also took the Little Dude out shopping earlier this week so that he could choose a present for the Baby that he could give himself. We had to have a good, clear talk about how we were going to the toy store and were going to see lots of lovely things, but that we were not going to buy anything for him that day. He suggested that we could choose a lego set and put it away for when his birthday comes and then we had to have a looooong example filled conversation about how his birthday is still several months away and that he might change his mind about what he wanted before then, plus also, we wanted his present to be a surprise so we would not buy it when he was there. He's been quite good about it, with only a little bit of regretfulness as he told me that he did not want his birthday to be in the summer any more, but that he wanted a winter birthday instead. Like the Baby. It reminds me of one of my favourite kid's books A Birthday For Frances, where the little girl/badger says to her imaginary friend "That's how it is with birthdays Grace, yours is always the one that is not now". Anyhow, he seemed to really enjoy the Baby's day, 'helping' him unwrap all his presents, and 'sharing' them with him. Its a good thing the Baby is pretty unpossessive as of yet, and always willing to let L.D. play with the new lego or the new fire truck as long as the L.D. asked him nicely first. And L.D. did ask very nicely to his credit.

Here's the Baby, carefully assembling a little lego car, with Daddy's help of course. I just love his concentrating face in the early morning light.

And that hair. Oh, the sweet bi-level baby mullet!

While the kids ate breakfast I made icing and Hubs cut out lots of little paper bunnies so that we could play Find the Rabbit later on. (side note: I did not go crazy with the games and themes like I will do when he is older. So Find the Rabbit is a simple, two-year-old appropriate game where you hide a couple dozen paper rabbits around the room and then let the kids find them. Easy, satisfying, cute. Done and done.)

I made some quick seven minute frosting for the cake I'd baked the night before, and of course, the birthday boy wanted a beater to lick. Its his birthday, so I was all like, "icing for breakfast? Why not?" He was very pleased.

Here is the final decorated cake. A small four layer gluten-free, dairy-free white cake, flavoured with a bit of cinnamon and cardamom, and iced with orange flavoured seven minute frosting topped with berries.

The Baby managed to successfully blow out his own candles (after several tries). I'm laughing in this picture because like many two-year-olds, he still finds blowing in a specific direction quite tricky. He mostly kept sticking out his lower lip and blowing up, so that his bangs fluttered, which was really really cute. After about five tries he did manage it though, about which he seemed very satisfied.

He sure did like that cake. As did the other kids. All plates were cleaned in a matter of minutes.

Later on in the day, after lunch and nap time, GranGran and Grandpapa came over. GranGran had made the Baby a card, which he really liked....

...because it had a picture of a baby on it. And not just any baby but "Baby Me!" as he likes to say. He loves photographs these days, and if he can get his hands on one of himself will carry it around proudly proclaiming "Picture Me!" to anyone who will listen. The use of the first person pronoun for himself is another indicator of his growing up, as he used to refer to himself as "Baby", but now is more likely to say "Me".

And here his is telling Grandpapa (just off to the side of this picture) how old he is. Holding up one finger on each hand he earnestly announces "Doo!", meaning 'two' of course.

And of course, we had to do the yearly ritual of measuring how much he'd grown. He is exactly the same height as the Little Dude was on his second birthday, which is funny as I think of his as the smaller of my two babies. I know the Little Dude weighed more all though his babyhood than the Baby did, but clearly he's caught up to him in terms of hight.

And we ended the day just as it had begun, with more icing (though on a cupcake this time). I believe he had a least four helpings of cake (and icing) over the course of the day. But since I had anticipated that this might happen I made two batches of cupcakes; one with the left over batter from my little cake (which is GF and DF but has plenty of sugar in it) and a second batch which was a sugar free carrot cake, with just a little bit of decorative icing on it. That way he felt like he was eating cake all day, but was not actually ingesting a ton of sugar. So that when bedtime rolled around he was happy and tired instead of cranky and wired.