Weekending, Birthday Party Style

If it hadn't been for the fact that we celebrated a special boy's third birthday this weekend, I would have a very boring weekend to report. Friday and Saturday were pretty run-of-the-mill, with the small exception that I spent any and all free time I had working on William's cake for his party. Sunday Darrell started the day with pancakes, and we let the birthday boy put some sprinkles in his to make them extra special. Our birthday boy then decided that he didn't need to take a nap after church (despite the fact that he was acting exhausted at church and threw two pretty substantial tantrums before lunch), so we made it over to my parent's house a little early for the party. It was a little hard to explain to him that he had to wait for everyone else to get there before he could open gifts, but thankfully it was nothing that a little Thomas the Train distraction couldn't solve. Once the whole family arrived (no big celebration this year; just my family) we broke out the cake and presents. And let me tell you, William was pretty thrilled to see this in front of him:

It was definitely a labor of love, but I am so glad I did it and am pretty proud of how it turned out. Gift opening was a bit of a slow process because he wanted to play with every toy he opened instead of opening more gifts--but I suppose there are worse problems to have. We then stayed at my parent's house to eat; my sister and her husband were providing dinner because they came in third in our little March Madness bet. Darrell, myself, and William took second (so we had to provide drinks), although the results from this year will forever have a little asterisk by it. You see, Darrell and I have won the past two years, so we decided this year that William's bracket would count toward our family average. Well, as it turns out, Darrell and I would have won if it hadn't been for William's bracket (although the boy deserves some credit--he really didn't drag us down that much and he actually beat my mom. Not bad for a kid who knows nothing about basketball and picked teams solely based on images of the school's logo). So Mike and Macy got to enjoy a victory, even though Darrell and I had brackets that were better than both of theirs. We'll see if we are feeling generous enough next year to let the brackets the boys fill out count toward our team average or not... I'll probably wait to decide that until after they've filled their brackets out ;-)  We put the boys to sleep there so we could stay up and play cards--which resulted in us staying up way later than we probably needed too--but it was a lot of fun and definitely something we don't do often enough any more.

I promise that an updated William post is coming soon--Darrell and I are seriously blown away when we think of how much he has changed in the past year and even though I know I'll never be able to do him justice in a blog post I'm sure going to try!