Birthdays!

Our two-month long birthday season has finally come to a close. And I think I need a nice, long break from cake and cupcakes. Jeremy's b-day was a little chaotic--poor guy, it was during the week of the marriage conference at our church, so I was feeling a little stressed with trying to make his birthday special and also trying to help out with conference-related things. Thankfully, we did most of our celebrating the weekend before. A week and a half later, was Evan's birthday. I had been looking forward to his 2nd birthday for quite some time, since as a two year old, he gets to have his own airplane seat on the airline we use the most here.


It was the perfect birthday party, since we just had our friend Erin and her two little boys over for dinner, present opening, and cake.


Here is my lop-sided Elmo cake creation.... It was fun to make, but don't worry, I won't be going into the cake making business any time soon...

Gettin' ready to blow those candles out!

It's amazing how much they change between their first and second birthdays. No more shoving a cupcake into his mouth with his bare hands--he's got a plate and a fork now & he knows how to use them.

Later that month, I turned 30, so Jeremy took me on a surprise (no kids!) trip to Baden-Baden and Freiburg, Germany. That's a whole blog post in it of itself, so more on that later.....

So, fast-forward to Rose's 4th birthday this month... Birthdays are taken very seriously in Germany. It was so fun to see how the teachers at her school went out of their way to make Rose feel special when she was the "geburtstag Kind" (birthday child). After school and naptime, it was time for her birthday party. Her party had a "little mommy" theme, so the girls (and boy) were supposed to bring their favorite doll from home.


Jeremy took a half day off work for the party, and he was the "baby doll doctor". The kids could take their dolls to him for check-ups.

friends and food

This is one of my German friends and her daughter, Lena, who goes to Rose's kindergarten. Lena doesn't really speak English, but after being exposed to so much English with her mom and I being friends, she now tells people (in German) that she speaks English and they don't!


When Evan started getting too unruly, we banished him to the highchair with a Capri-Sun.


Cupcake time! I found these tiny little dolls on sale at Globus and stuck them into the kids' cupcakes and let them pick their favorite one. You can still see Rose's black eye from the trampoline at school in this picture.....


Present-opening time was not the orderly process that I would have liked it to be, but somehow Jeremy still managed to get a few pictures of Rose through the huddle of small kids.

Part of me is sad that all our birthdays are squished into a 60 day period, but right now I'm kind of glad that I won't have to prepare for any more birthdays until next January!