Birthday Celebrations – Part II

Between Nate’s and my families, during the 9 days from February 9 to February 18, there are 7 birthdays: one son, two brothers, one sister, one sister-in-law, and two nephews. On Saturday, we went to a fun Nerf gun party for Nate’s nephew Connor. We played fun games and enjoyed yummy treats. Bennett stayed occupied picking up nerf bullets most of the time, and running around with his cousins.

On Sunday, we had my brother and sister over for dinner to celebrate their and Bennett’s birthdays. I wanted to take advantage of the fun cake decorating kit my mom gave me for Christmas so I decided to make another cake. We went for a soccer ball this time – mostly for Bennett (sorry Cam!). Bennett at least recognized it this time and kept pointing to the soccer cake. Bennett made a valiant effort to blow out his two candles on top of the soccer ball, but in the end I think he had some help from Dave and Cam.

(apparently he thinks he needs to keep an eye on Dave :)

Once again, Bennett didn’t actually want to eat any cake. He hasn’t been into sweets lately. However, he did have a lot of fun helping Liz feed his doggy some cake and saying “num num” with each bite.

Bennett helped us get a group picture (or about 20) – once I got the remote out, he wouldn’t give it up.

Happy Birthday Bennett!!

Bennett turned 2 last week – I can’t believe we have a 2-year-old! We opened a few of his presents in the morning before Nate left for work – we decided to “give” him his new room for his birthday, so he got to open his ball pictures, ball rug, and doggy pillowcase:

That morning, Bennett and I celebrated by meeting up with my friends Laura and Elise and Bennett’s friends Grace and Madeline at the Discovery Gateway in Salt Lake. We hadn’t been there before, so it was fun to explore and see what they had. Bennett especially liked the ball zone (with tubes and tunnels to put the balls through), the construction zone, and the water table area.

going down the slide, peeking over the top of the tube you can slide blocks down in the construction zone, and climbing into the bird’s house

playing at the water table with Grace and Madeline

cranking the wheel to send a ball up, and riding in the little car

After the museum, we met up with Nate for lunch (nothing too exciting - pizza in the break room at his work – but Bennett loved it). That night, we had our neighbors over for cake and ice cream. I made Bennett a basketball cake, but when I asked him what it was he didn’t seem to know (or at least, didn’t feel like telling us). I know my cake-making skills aren’t great, but you can at least tell what it is, right? (he’s now watching me as I’m writing this and is pointing to the picture saying “ball-ball cake”, so I guess he does get it now :)

After they left, we went to open a few more presents from us and his grandparents and aunt & uncle, and the power went out. There was a big windy snowstorm, so we gathered up all our flashlights (luckily I had just replaced the batteries in our big one a couple weeks before) and some candles and he opened the rest of the presents by flashlight. He is still very methodical about opening his presents, pulling small pieces off at a time, but he is at least more excited about the actual presents than the wrapping.

We had planned to fill his new room with balloons and have him run in there on his birthday, but it got late and the power was still out (it didn’t come back on until 1:30) so we waited and did it the next day. He thought it was pretty fun! He loves his new bed, although he doesn’t really like to stay in it the whole night – he wanders into our room usually several times a night, and early in the morning. Overall he’s doing ok and we’ve had some good nights to help us survive the bad, we’re just hoping he gets the hang of it pretty quickly! Here he is playing with the balloons (we took a video when he first ran into the room, but it’s pretty long so we’ll just give you the short one).

I keep thinking this at every age, but he is at such a fun age right now. We love seeing the funny things he does and his new words and how he says them (my latest favorite is “ok”, he says the “o” sound 3 times :). He still LOVES balls – playing golf, basketball (he dribbles, passes, shoots, and says “score”, “almost”, “missed”), and just throwing balls back and forth. He loves dogs and several times a week will say “grandpa…house…Zoe (their dog)…balls” – he loves to see Zoe when we go up there and throw her the ball. He still loves orange, and is starting to identify some of the other colors too. He is definitely an active little boy, but still loves to be held and usually doesn’t like to be too far from either one of us, so I have a shadow pretty much everywhere I go :) Happy Birthday Bennett!!

Basketball, Bloch, and Burgers

I’ll admit up front that this post will violate my brother’s requirement that if you have kids, your post should have more pictures than words. I’ll throw in a couple random ones of Bennett so it’s not too boring, even though they don’t relate to the rest of the post :)

We had a fun Saturday – it started out with not much planned and ended up being somewhat busy, but in a good / fun way. We spent the morning making some progress getting Bennett’s new room set up, then went to a fun circus-themed birthday party for a little boy Bennett’s age. It was a great party where they even had an incredibly talented balloon guy who made Bennett an impressive John Deere tractor balloon. We then headed down to Provo for the BYU basketball game. It was the first one we’ve been to this year and it was fun to see them play. Unfortunately, it was Bennett’s naptime and he fell asleep on the way down, and laid his head on Nate’s shoulder the rest of the first half (we got there a little after it started). I was a little disappointed because he usually LOVES watching basketball if we see a clip or commercial on TV or if it’s on at a restaurant or store we go to. Fortunately, he seemed to wake up more the second half and although he got nervous a couple times with all the cheering, he loved clapping when we made a basket (and sometimes when the other team did) and raising his hands when we shot free throws.

After the game, we walked down to the Museum of Art and went to the Carl Bloch exhibit. It was neat to see the beautiful paintings, especially the ones depicting Christ’s life, in person. They were very impressive. We may have to go back without Bennett when we can spend a little more time enjoying it. We stopped by my sister Camille’s for a quick visit before going down to Red Robin for dinner. Bennett was really good at dinner. Apparently the trick is to (a) have high chairs that are on wheels so we can wheel him to different sides of the table and he can push himself back to entertain himself and (b) have really good fries :)

And now, for some random pictures unrelated to our weekend adventures:

 

Bennett looking at the “big fish” in the aquarium at Cabela’s last weekend, and choosing books before his nap (he tried to bring the whole pile over to me to read).

Showing off his new Toy Story slippers – I found them on clearance at Target for $2 and he loves wearing them around. It’s pretty cute to see him running down the hall with wings and flames on his feet :)