Henry Turned Two, So We Headed to the Zoo!

we had a wonderful birthday party for hj monkey with friends and family at the zoo. we were so close to the polar bears we could see them walking around while we ate! we made bug collectors and collected (fake, mostly) bugs and had a puppet show and face painting and all kinds of fun. a great crowd showed up despite the heat and the loooooooong walk to get to the picnic area where we were.


after the party, i swore up and down i was going to simplify things next year and just do a small, simple family gathering with cake and birthday hats. but now i'm thinking a PIRATE PARTY with TREASURE MAPS and BURIED TREASURE (booty) and EYE PATCHES FOR EVERYONE!!

we'll see.  (which means, ARRRR, MATEY!)

anyway. henry had a great time with his friends and he got so much great loot. toys and books and clothes and baseball and golf sets and a mini kitchen with all the fixins' and lots of crafty things to paint and draw with.

and even a dragon tail!

i can't help but laugh, though, every time he gets a mountain of presents. he opens the first couple and then seems put out that he can't just play with those and has to keep tearing through the rest of them. and he 's still at the point where the box it came in is as fun as the content.



after all, the 5 best toys of all time are: stick, box, string, cardboard tube, and dirt.  :)

we are so thankful to all our wonderful people who love on him (us) so much! and we couldn't do it without them! (= they are enabling my birthday party addiction).

I Guess We Would Not Know How Sweet the Sweet is Without the Bitter

well.

i spent all day yesterday reveling in henry's vivaciousness and life and celebrating his two years with us on this planet. every day has been bigger and better than the last and i can't believe how blessed i've been as his mom. 

but i spent all week leading up to it aching for another mom who just lost her little guy on the cusp of his own 2nd birthday. i know she and her family are doing their best to figure out how to get through this. but. how. do. you. it's the kind of thing that shakes your faith to its core but its also when you need your faith most. clinging to the reassurance that God is making their little guy laugh now that He has him and that they'll be together with him again. there's hope in that, but they have to really squeeze for it.

and i spent all morning today weeping openly and snotting all over myself in church as one of my favorite women told her testimony of her lady parts rebelling against her and watching her chance of hatching her own kids slip further and further away. full of faith and stamina and fire, she shown with strength and grace. she is still alive! still in love! feeling blessed! but also so, so broken-hearted. again, hope is there. but she has to sift around in the ashes for it. and it's messy work.

and a great friend is recovering from the disappointment of the failure of science's best method to knock a body up. still hoping for success, for fruitfulness, but finding it harder and harder to hope. she's still mending a lot of wounds that hope has inflicted in the past. hope is the best medicine, but it's kind of an a-hole, too. frankly.

and sometimes i feel like it's all just not fair. and it just doesn't make sense. and so i cry and i pray. i beg God to grant peace and abundant blessings on them as they try to heal and find a path through this. and i give huge thanks over what we have. i'm not sure what else to do.

maintaining perspective is a great thing in theory, but near impossible when your heart and world are both torn down the middle. but i will say that the great thing about growing older is that you have enough years behind you to know that the darkest nights have always turned up with sun again in the mornings. you've survived some powerful awful stuff before, odds are good you can do it again. you don't want to have to, but you probably can.

and so, these ladies will survive. and maybe out of the pain will come something beautiful and unexpected.

we'll just keep hoping.

Birthday Hat

so this little person turns 2 tomorrow. every time i mention his birthday for the past two weeks, he says "henry birthday hat." i had no idea how he even knew what a birthday hat was, but i've been meaning to go get him a pile of party hats to take to daycare with him for a little party.

well.

i worse-mom-in-the-world'd it and totally forgot and totally didn't even start making his cupcakes for daycare until 10pm last night either...and so sent him off to school this morning with (pretty delicious, thank you very much, might redeem me a little) strawberry cupcakes but no hats.

so i went to pick him up this afternoon and found in his little cubby, a homemade birthday hat that his teachers had made, along with a little present they'd given him. apparently whenever any of the kids have birthdays, they get this special construction paper hat made for them, and that's what he's been talking about this whole time. evidently, as soon as they all ate the cupcakes and sang 'happy birthday' to him, he started demanding the hat that he knew he had coming. :)

ANOTHER reason i adore this daycare, outside of hat rescues, is that after i'd picked up the birthday boy (literally. "carry. up! up!"), his blanket and sheet, diaper bag, birthday hat, present, lunchbag, etc, etc, etc and dumped it all in the car next to his car seat while i fastened him in....i kneeled on my keys, locked the car, shut the door and promptly started to swear. so at least it wasn't hot out (ahem, june, wtf?) but my baby man was locked in the car! so i panicked only a lot as i tried to figure out how to get him out ASAP. ultimately, one of the amazing providers, who used to be his primary caregiver when he was littler, and who babysits for us sometimes, let me BORROW HER BRAND NEW CAR to drive home to get my spare key while she stayed by my car and entertained him.

amazing.

of course he was unharmed and grinning like a goof when i got back. probably thought the whole thing was a game.  :)

we're doing a few fun things tomorrow with good friends and then his big family/friends party will be in a few weeks at the zoo!! more to follow.