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2008-06-14 - 1.08am previous entry next entry
Matthew is almost two!!!
It's almost Matthew's birthday! Well, it's after midnight now, so technically it's his birthday already, but he wasn't born till 10.45pm so I really can't count it yet!
I need to go to bed, but I wanted to quickly update before Matthew's birthday, then I'll write about his day afterwards. I feel AWFUL that I never did get around to writing about Arthur's 3rd birthday! I have all the photos still. Maybe one day I'll catch up on it?!
Today I baked a simple birthday cake for Matthew when they were out with Neil at the park. Nathan watched me from his bouncy chair :) Arthur is going to be so disappointed that it's not chocolate cake (he is SO like me about chocolate, hehe!), but Matthew doesn't seem to care all that much about whether a cake is chocolate or not. He DOES especially like any cake with raisins in it. He LOVES raisins. If I bake one without raisins, he searches through it pitifully, breaking it apart with his fingers and saying, "Ree-ree? Ree-ree?" and looking at me beseechingly until I put a handful on his plate with his cake, hehe!
Soooo I baked a basic vanilla sponge cake, but just tipped in a TON of raisins. If I had had a bit more forethought, I would have baked a light fruit cake, but those are supposed to sit for 24-48 hours before cutting/decorating, so I didn't have time. Anyway, it came out fine :) Tonight I finished his cake and was DONE by 9.30pm!!! I am always always up till the middle of the night decorating cakes because they always take me longer than I expect! Maybe I didn't shoot so high with this one? We are not having a party, and no family members are coming over at all to see Matthew on his birthday! :( But, he won't care - he loves his little family unit, so we'll have all the cake to ourselves, haha! ;) And have fun together. *I* would have liked a little more attention for him, but that really doesn't matter because it isn't important to Matthew. He wasn't too comfortable at a party he went to a couple of weeks ago, so I am in no hurry to get him into children's parties before he wants to. His best friend in the whole world is Arthur, and the feeling is mutual. I love that!! :)
So the cake is small, made from just one loaf tin shaped cake. I made him a tractor cake! I cut the end off and stuck it on top of the rest of the loaf at one end, for the driver's cab. Then I covered the whole thing in butter icing and laid red ready-roll fondant icing on top. I used huge double choc chip cookies for wheels under the "cab" on either side, and Oreos for the front wheels. I used Smarties to brighten up the centres of the wheels, and yellow ones for headlights. I cut a lump of chocolate into a stick shape for the exhaust pipe on top of the bonnet, and then cut windows in the red fondant, and filled them in with butter icing. Then I piped "Matthew" on top, and "2" on the back, and outlined a few details (windows, etc) in black ready-to-use icing, and it was done! It was so much quicker than usual, I'm not sure why. Maybe it was just a smaller cake, or I was more willing to cut corners with easy options like writing icing, roll-on fondant, and biscuits for wheels! Anyway, it was fun to do and I think Matthew will really like it. I'll try to remember to take photos before we cut it! :)
I'm so frustrated that we don't have any new tapes for the video camera (haven't for many months) so this will be the first of my children's birthdays where the camcorder isn't used :( BUT, at least we do have a video function on the new camera. I will have to keep any clips short because they are very big files and take forever to upload online, but I'll try to take lots of pics and video clips tomorrow!
We are going to the same farm that we went to for Arthur's 2nd birthday! Just the five of us. Last time, Matthew was a 5-month-old baby in the Baby Bjorn sling, just like Nathan is! (FIVE months old yesterday, can you believe it?! Also, Nathan is NOT like Matthew - even though he is actually gestationally only 4 months old, the Baby Bjorn barely does up around his torso now!). I wonder if we'll be doing the same thing again for Nathan's 2nd birthday (can NOT fathom Nathan as a 2-year-old yet!) with another 5-month-old baby (boy - you know it'll be a boy!) in the Baby Bjorn?! I hope I'll be that blessed...
Tonight I also wrapped up Matthew's presents. He has 3 little books - two about tractors, and one about James from Thomas the Tank Engine. And the Tesco toy tractor and pack of matchbox cars. I know he'll LOVE those! That's all we were able to afford to get him. But the sand-and-water table from my parents arrived and we assembled it tonight (the easiest thing I ever assembled, and it looks like a fab table!), and then I wrapped it. It looks like the most enormous present, assembled and wrapped up! He has four cards that came in the post so far, and I put those on top with the smaller gifts. I made him a tractor birthday card last night using instructions that I found online for how to draw a tractor! It came out nicely, and today Arthur and I wrote the message on the inside and he made it very colourful :) So that's on the pile of presents too.
We finally ordered the big carpet road map thingy and four Playmobil 1.2.3 (18 months +) chunky vehicles (including a tractor!!!), with the cheque that Granny and Grandoug sent for him. I WISH I had got myself together to do that earlier, or at least ask if they'd mind sending a cheque earlier, so that Matthew could have had those fun things to open on his actual birthday. But never mind. They should be here in the first part of next week. I can't wait till the boys see the road carpet! :) Right now we have a large flattened cardboard box (the house-move packing type), and when it's flattened out it fills most of our living room floor. I drew a big maze of roads on it, and they play with that for hours every day! We keep adding to it - now it has a playground, a garage (complete with my badly drawn mechanic!), and a set of colourful "Balamory" houses, etc. And Tesco's with a big car park! I know they'll love the carpet when it comes.
Food tomorrow is all Matthew-centred. Normal breakfast - he eats Weetabix (just one) and rice crispies on top. And snacks tomorrow will be Organix cocoa and raisin cereal bars (he loves those!) and their Elephant Biscuits (another fave). We'll take a picnic to the farm, so it will be his normal lunch anyway, which he likes - sandwiches (marmite, Nutella, etc), Bob the Builder ham, Thomas the Tank Engine fromage frais, apple, etc.
Matthew is WAY more picky these days with food than he ever was before. I know it's his age, and he'll outgrow it. I'm anxiously waiting for that! ;) It's so stressy dealing with ultra-picky toddlers! Anyway, his current favourites are macaroni cheese and anything CHICKEN. This boy loves his MEAT. Seriously. He will leave the sauce and pasta when we have spaghetti bolognese, but pick out every morsel of minced meat that he can find, declaring triumphantly, "Meep, meep!" every time he finds one, before popping it in his mouth! (meep being MEAT, of course! ;) ) He looooves meat. Any type. But I think his very favourite has to be chicken. He gets SO excited to see it on the plates when he is put in his highchair and that's what we're having for dinner! He cries out, "Cyee-cyick!" ("c-y" is how he manages to pronounce "ch").
So tomorrow we're having a meal combo especially for Matthew! We're having macaroni cheese and mini chicken fillets, just cooked plain and cut up for him. He prefers it plain as plain can be, ideally. No marinades, no gravy, no sauces, etc. But he'll eat it covered in ANYTHING, all the same!
We'll have birthday cake for dessert. I really hope he enjoys his birthday!
I can't believe he is about to be TWO. I am happy and relieved to have a two-year-old again - doesn't that sound like a weird thing to say?! :) But I am. I love little ones, and I love HAVING little ones of my own. Since Arthur has been 3 these last 7 months, I've missed having a 2-year-old! So I'm really happy to have another 12 months of "Mummy-to-a-2-year-old" status ahead of me again :) Also, I now have a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old! I like that too :)
Most exciting to me is the fact that I have achieved something really special again. My own personal goal with all my babies is to breastfeed them for at least 2 years. My plan is actually to let them self-wean, but my heartfelt desire is to breastfeed each of them till they are 2 - to at least reach that milestone. Two years seems to take a long time to come around! It's a long time to have breastfed continuously (forgetting for a moment that I was already nursing continuously for the 19 months before I started with Matthew - 3yrs and 7mths now, yay me!), and I really did think that Matthew might self-wean before he turned two, given that he was a much less breast-focused baby, shall we say, than Arthur ever was. I'm SO EXCITED that he's still breastfeeding!!!! :D And proud of myself for two babies nursed to the age of 2 and beyond! :)
I really really really wanted to make a montage of photos and stuff of Matthew to post for his birthday, but as expected I simply haven't had the time. We're STILL trying to recover from the latest cold virus - Neil has conjunctivitis and a maybe-possibly ear infection (bulging ear drum, but no build up of fluid behind it yet), and everybody else is still kind of snotty and tired out and achy. Please pray that we DON'T catch anything else at the farm! We just seem to be on a run of illnesses and on a low ebb immune-wise. Matthew and Nathan are teething, which naturally makes them way more prone to illnesses (I have discovered my kids are like this!).
Anyway, hopefully Matthew will have a great birthday and I will update about it asap! I'll TRY to catch up on the things I'm behind on here after that!
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