Of a Second Birthday Celebration

Today we celebrated Emmett's second birthday.  We let Emmett have his day a little early so as not to conflict with Daddy's day of pampering tomorrow.  I don't think Emmett was very sad about it.

I have, however, discovered that birthdays stress me out.  Even keeping things low-key as we do around here (mostly because I'm not a good event planner - at all) causes a little anxiety.  Because even though we didn't throw a party or invite any friends or have any family close enough with which to celebrate, I still felt some sort of pressure to make this day Emmett's perfect day.

There's a problem with that plan.

Emmett's two (or not even).

He's not very good at expressing what he likes or dislikes and every request he makes is typically a mere mimic of his sister's desires.  Thus, we have yet to learn what Emmett really wants.

Still, keeping with the knowledge that, again, he's two, and he'll be unlikely to remember this event in the future, on top of the fact that toddlers are fairly easy to entertain without big bonanzas or fancy outings, we opted to stay in.  We enjoyed his favorite breakfast - eggs and banana muffins - before heading out to play in the two tents Daddy set up with a tunnel between them, and also with the bubble-blowing lawn mower from Grandma and Grandpa.

He opened the rest of his presents later - just a few from family as our children have quite enough with which to entertain themselves as it is - and had donuts for lunch (because Mommy tried to make them for breakfast before she noticed the dough was required to chill for two hours). After a dinner of pizza, he blew out the candle on his baseball cupcake.

And then we all headed out to play with his new tee-ball set from Gram and Grandy.

We finished the evening by dancing to the credits of his selected movie ("Megamind") and listening to Micaiah read his new book from Nenaw and Papaw ("Brown Bear, Brown Bear").

And he seemed pretty happy.

So, even though it wasn't a big affair and still left me feeling like maybe it wasn't perfect enough, I'm guessing, even if it might not have been a "perfect" day, he considered it pretty good, indeed.

1,000 Gifts:
585. Tiny fingernails needing clipping
586. Curly hair freed from its ponytail
587. Keeping cool with a fine-misting hose
588. Colorful tunnels
589. Rainbows in a misted spray
590. Donut holes fresh from the oil
591. His tee-ball stance
592. Dancing with my littles (again)
593. Her reading the bedtime story from memory