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2008-06-28 - 11.24pm previous entry next entry
Matthew's 2nd Birthday (Part Three!)
Wowwwww, thank you so much for ALL the comments (and note!) last entry!! I should shamelessly beg more often, hehe! ;) Seriously, it meant so much to me to come back and read all those comments! I really did work super hard on these birthday entries and I really appreciate your thoughts on them! Thank you!! :)
So this is the last part of Matthew�s Birthday (at last!). I spent this evening resizing the last of the EIGHTY THREE photos that I�m keeping. I have tried to cut those down for these entries even (like having only one out of several samey photos here), but yeah 83 in my Photobucket account! Part Three of Matthew�s birthday photos and videos covers the time after we arrived home from the farm. Once Nathan had nursed and napped, and Matthew had woken up properly, we had a couple more presents for him to open that we didn�t get to before going to the farm.
First of all, the boys played a bit while we put Matthew�s birthday dinner on to cook � here�s Matthew playing with Nathan (who loved the attention!):
Then Matthew opened some more birthday cards and the last of his tractor books (HERE�S the part where he opened the one called �Tremendous Tractors�, not as I had thought in Part One after all!):
Here he is opening the tractor card that I made him from his mummy and daddy and brothers � you can barely see it with the angle and the blur, but it�s the only photo I have of it so you�re stuck with it, hehe! He loved the tractor picture! And alllll of Arthur�s drawing inside :)
Arthur looking at Matthew�s birthday card from my brother:
The card from my parents had a real (unused) balloon as part of the design, so I blew it up for Matthew. He was so excited by it and kept calling it �ball� � refusing to accept that it was a balloon instead! It looked like his favourite �gift� so far at that point! He just loved it. Here is a short video clip of Matthew (and Arthur) playing with the balloon. Mine is the pained voice in the background, as Matthew�s favourite thing was to scrunch that balloon with his fingernails as he picked it up or held it, and ooooooh I can�t BEAR that sound! I hate it when balloons pop and just knew it was about to pop at any second (for the record, it�s STILL inflated even today, despite the incredible amount of scrrrunching and scrrratching that it has endured!), so I was kind of squeamish while he was playing with it! Arthur too, he spent most of the time with his hands over his ears in anticipation, hehe!
The boys playing together with all the new cars (and the zillion "old" ones!) at the sofa for a while (their usual game!):
Then it was time to open the last present � the sand and water table from Nana and Grandy! Here�s a very short clip of Matthew opening the present, and automatically climbing on it (because it�s furniture, right?). We actually DID the water play the next day (or the day after, I can�t remember � whenever the weather was okay), but let them explore the water and sand toys that were inside the table after Matthew opened it on his birthday, and explained what it was all for.
Here are the boys driving cars on the lid � the lid doubles as a road track for Early Learning Centre vehicles, of which we have a few. They preferred to drive their normal cars on it though, and had a great time till dinner was served!
Then came Matthew�s special birthday dinner � a combination of his favourite foods, which are macaroni cheese, and chicken (any style, but preferably plain). He loves sweetcorn, and raw carrot (like Arthur!). So he had all those things together! He was so excited when he saw his plateful of food! He did a high-pitched gasp and yelled, �Chi-chick! Wwwooooowww!� :)
After dinner came.... BIRTHDAY CAKE!!! At last � Arthur had been asking about it all day! I made it the night before his birthday. Arthur knew it was going to be a tractor cake, but Matthew had noooo idea about his birthday cake. I guess he�s too little to really know much about birthday cake till it happens! I was really pleased with how it turned out, except that the buttercream icing that I made to stick the wheels and Smarties onto the cake showed too much! I wasn�t very tidy about it. And the red fondant looked kind of dry and cracked in parts, and was clearly an amateur job! But the boys loved it, and I was happy with it in general. Thanks for the mention of US �Smarties� in my comments last entry, Sarah! I think last time I made a cake with Smarties on (Arthur�s last birthday I think?), I made sure to say that they are pretty much the same thing as M&Ms in the US, but then somebody said that they do have Smarties in the States, and I felt like I�d said something daft! I didn�t realise they�re a completely different thing! Smarties (the chocolate type!) are British, although I read that you can get them in Canada too � it was worth explaining because they go sooooo well on chocolate cakes! The sour hard candies do not sound like they would be nice on cakes! :P
So, of course, we took video footage of the actual sing-happy-birthday-and-blow-out-the-candles part! :) There are two � they come as �Take One� and �Take Two� because somebody other than the birthday boy blew out the candles without warning the first time, hehe!
The irony is that the same somebody got to blow out the candles in �Take Two�, since the incredibly cute blowing efforts of the actual birthday boy didn�t result in the candles going out! So sweet! :)
Here are some actual photos of the birthday cake!
Here�s the last video clip from Matthew�s birthday! It�s a little longer than the others (took donkeys� years to upload!) but still under 2 minutes long. I had cut the cake and served the boys, and Matthew was delighted that it was full of raisins! He LOVES raisins, as I mentioned before! He calls them �ree-ree�, and he has this funny/weird little thing he does before he eats them. He likes their squishy-but-contained consistency, and likes to take one in each hand and sort of grind it between thumb and forefinger for a bit. The funny/weird part is that he always has such a crazy look on his face, really mischievous and silly, and he looks at you funny with his eyes at an angle and says, �ree-ree-ree-ree-ree-ree!� hehe! Silly boy! It always makes us laugh when he does this, so the purpose of the video was to capture that little quirky thing for our own memory records. And then I asked him about his birthday and Arthur started chatting, and so it�s mostly just us talking about birthday cake in the end! But I like it, because it�s �us� at the dinner table, just as we always are:
And then after he�d picked ALL the raisins out of the cake and eaten them, Matthew did another traditional mealtime thing, and rubbed the cake into his hair! *sigh* But he was so happy :) I think he had a lovely birthday!
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