After Bennett’s birthday in February, Ryan had been talking about his upcoming birthday regularly. Multiple times a week, I would hear sentences starting with “Maybe when it’s my birfday party…”. I don’t think Nate was as excited about his birthday as Ryan, but hopefully his birthday was still fun. We didn’t do anything super exciting, but Nate was able to leave work early, so we enjoyed having him home for the evening. I made him honey walnut shrimp for dinner (and since the boys and I don’t like shrimp, it really was a special dinner just for him). Instead of a cake, we had fruit pizzas for dessert – yum! I didn’t think we could fit 32 candles on a little cookie, so we had to make do with 3 on one cookie and 2 on another.
We did manage to have a date night a few days later and had some friends watch the kids while we had a little date night going out to dinner. It was nice to have a couple of hours with just the two of us, and to extend the birthday celebrations a little longer.
Ryan’s birthday was less than a week later. We decided we didn’t want to do another big party like we had done for Bennett’s birthday (since it was just 6 weeks earlier), but I wanted to make sure it was a special day for him and that we did something a little different. We decided to go to the zoo – fortunately, the weather cooperated. It started raining that afternoon just as we were leaving but although it was overcast, it was relatively warm and not rainy while we were there. They gave Ryan a special big “I’m Celebrating my Birthday” pin and tokens for both the boys to ride the carousel. They two highlights of our zoo trip were the bears (the zookeepers fed them when we were standing just about 10 feet away) and the carousel ride, which Ryan especially loved.
That night, we had spaghetti for dinner, then Ryan was excited to open the rest of his presents. I ended up missing one of the key ingredients for his cake (don’t remember now what it was), so we sang to him and had him blow out candles a couple days later at my sister’s house. We sure love this little guy! Happy Birthday Ryan!!
