Happy (Almost) Birthday!

Pre Birthday Party

Colin turns three on August 20th. We'll be in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea celebrating in Barcelona Spain on that day, and since it's kinda hard to bring a bunch of presents on a cruise ship, we had to work out alternative plans. We are leaving August 1st for a month long European vacation that has us driving around Europe some before reaching our port of call in Rome to depart on the cruise. Having Colin's birthday so early didn't seem quite right, but making the poor kid wait weeks afterward until we are back home didn't seem quite right either. When we come back from the vacation both Shelby and I will jump right back into full time work and Colin will spend most of his days at preschool, so we figured giving him his presents now would give him some good quality time with them before we have to leave.

So on a whim we decided to grab a birthday cake and celebrate yesterday. Shelby took Colin to the park and I set to wrapping the things we had collected over the last month or so for Colin's birthday. I thought I had three rolls of good boy wrapping paper upstairs, but what I really had was three scraps of boyish wrapping paper hiding on three rolls. Each one barely enough to wrap anything, let alone the four giant boxes I had to wrap for him. I managed to piece together a few and for the others got creative with brown mailing paper and Sharpie markers! LOL Colin didn't seem to mind as it all tore off about the same in the opening frenzy. He had a good stash of loot from Mommy & Daddy, Grandma & Grandpa Goetzman and Aunt Shauna and Uncle Dave.




He'll have a nice supply of gifts from other family members awaiting him when we return from vacation, so in reality the kid gets to celebrate his birthday a total of three times this year. Not bad! Wonder if I can figure out a way to milk my next birthday for that long?




After opening presents and making Daddy put together a remote control race track, and a kitchen set while Mommy worked on building a Marble Race, we did birthday cake. I'm a sucker for Carvel cake and colin doesn't object to ice cream so we went that route again this year. Opening presents took a little longer than expected and we forgot about the cake thawing on the counter for while and it got a little soupy. So again with the creativity...Colin didn't get to blow out candles on an actual cake, he had to blow them out on a rapidly melting bowl of ice cream cake. I was thankful it remained solid enough to hold the three candles upright long enough to sing the birthday song and blow them out. Again, Colin didn't seem to mind one bit that it wasn't a whole fancy birthday cake presented to him. I'm so thankful for the ease of pleasing a soon-to-be-three year old, in a few years I'll have to be better prepared so I don't embarass him with homemade wrapping paper and melting birthday cake! LOL



I'd call birthday celebration number one a success, I hope the other two turn out to be as fun.