OUR GROWING FAMILY: The BirthDAY'S

As always the boys had a shared birthday party but we try to make each of thier individual actual birthday's a special day as well.
First came James' big day. First thing Saturday morning, August 11th we woke up to singing Happy Birthday to the birthday boy in bed. What a great way to wake up! Then it's off to the kitchen to open up presents from mom and dad. This year James asked for quite a few things but we narrowed it down to just a few :) He has been OBSESSED with drums lately. He has a friend that a really nice drum kit that he adores. Our house is not quite large enough nor is my sanity in tack enough to have real drums in the house :) so we went with an electric drum pad - which was just as great to him. In fact at one point he told me that if his friend with the real drum kit came over he would think his new drums were "so much cooler"! Ha! Glad you think so little man :) We also got him a battery operated microphone so he can be a full on performer now :)

(For those of you that are blog "followers" you will notice that, as always, James is wearing his "sticky" shirt even with just his undies!)

We also let John-Mark open a gift as well since they were having a pool party the following day and the gifts could be used at the party. They have both been asking for swimming flippers. They were super excited to be able to swim like scuba divers (sort of) Benjamin was pretty happy about them too - they made perfect teethers :)
After opening presents James got to pick the breakfast of his choice - he chose Banana Nut muffins. He also had a special mini breakfast birthday cupcake.

Later that morning Mom Mom and Papa Steve came down and spent the morning with us. They brought lunch and special birthday cupcakes :) plus presents!

The following day was the big party but before that my dad (Papa Duck) came down for a visit and brought a special lunch (with juice) - a tradition with Papa Duck. He also brought the boys gifts - James got a baseball pitching/catching thingie :) It's great because one side has a tight net that he can throw to and the ball bounces back for him to catch or hit - gives this preggo mamma a break for a bit :)

Focused :)

My toy kid got this cool spider man that shoots out string from his palm when you push his back. He LOVED it and had Spider Man "hangin' around" all over the place :) Much to my surprise this toy is still in one piece and the string hasn't been ripped out yet!
(I'll do a post dedicated to the party next)
Tuesday, August 14th we woke up again to singing happy birthday to the birthday boy in bed. John-Mark was SOOO excited to finally hit the BIG 4!! He was finally the real birthday boy!! His big present was a super fun race track. Love the pic with the fist pump - he was excited :)

His breakfast of choice was blueberry muffins and ofcourse he had his special birthday breakfast cupcake as well. Since his birthday was on a Tuesday no other family was able to come and visit but we had a special lunch date with daddy. John-Mark got to pick any place he wanted to go and he chose Chick-fil-A - as if we don't visit there enough :)

Overall I think the boys had two pretty great birthday's. Still can't believe they are 5 and 4 now! I came across the video from the mornings they turned 2 and 3 recently! Really feels like just yesterday! Watching them I realized how much more verbal Gracie is than James was at 3. He was talking but still in broken sentences with wrong noun/verb tense. Gracie isn't even 3 yet and she speaks in perfect sentences. She was a little over nine months in the video and hadn't even started crawling yet and here Benjamin will be 11 months in a few days and he's already taking 3 or 4 steps at a time! Seems my boys and girl are text book when it comes to girls being more verbal earlier and boys being more active.
Funny story -
The Allen family rule is we share everything except for maybe their special bedtime blankets. All toys are to be shared. If you're playing with it you don't have to hand it over if another wants it but if you're not playing with it and someone else grabs your Buzz or baby doll you're not allowed to pull the whole "mine" fit and demand it. The only time this rule doesn't apply is on your birthday or Christmas. On those days you get to be as stingy as you like. You have the choice if you want to let others share in your toys or not. EVERYONE wanted a chance to play James' drums but he wasn't too in to sharing on his birthday- which was fine - he was playing with them quite a bit. However, when John-Mark got his race track all the sudden James was ever so generous with his drums in the hopes to get a turn with the race track. As usual John-Mark was pretty nice and let James play with his track MOST of the time. however there were a few times he said no. So James and I had to have a talk about him having the same priviledges on his bday and he didn't really share too much and this is a good time to think about how we should treat others like we want to be treated. To which he responded so honestly, "well, I didn't know he was going to get something cool that I would want to play with!" Well, there you go. Life lesson learned hopefully :)