Happy Birthday, Daddy!

I can't believe how excited the kids were for a birthday that is not one of their own today.  I mean, they certainly get excited for other kids' birthday parties that we're going to, but the excitement they both exuded all day long over Ethan's birthday was akin to their excitement about their own special days.  As Julia put it, this morning:

"Mom!  This is, like, the BEST day, because... SWIM LESSONS, a NEW Curious George, making Daddy's cake, dinner at Sol Azteca, and THEN we get to eat cake and give Daddy his PRESENTS!!!"

Unfortunately, swim lessons were canceled due to thunderstorms, and a 911 SwiftAlert about a black bear on the loose in Needham kept us indoors most of the day, but the girls didn't seem to mind.  They thoroughly enjoyed helping me bake Ethan's cake this afternoon:

They were especially helpful as my frosting taste-testers, each dipping a finger into the frosting as I mixed it to give me helpful advice on what more was needed.  I'm pretty sure the frosting was okay from the start, but I indulged their desire to continue licking chocolate off their fingers and let them advise me on whether to add more vanilla, sugar, chocolate, etc.

Even though Ethan left work at 4pm today to be home with us for his birthday evening, Julia found it an intolerable wait until he arrived.  Standing sentry at the window from about 4:10 on, she waited on lookout so that she could run out and greet him in the driveway with a hearty "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"  Thankfully, I was able to spot Ethan on his walk home from the train, as Julia had gotten too distracted trying to squeeze Madeleine's bum in order to make her giggle, and I gave fair warning enough for both girls to get outside and issue their birthday greeting. 

Next order of business was the giving of presents, beginning with Julia's very own home-made gifts.  First was a picture she made: one one side of the paper she had drawn Daddy, Mommy, herself, and Madeleine:

On the back of this paper was a drawing of Julia and Daddy together:

Her second gift to Daddy was a card, on which she had drawn a picture of, in her words, "Your wedding to Mommy, and here's you and Mommy dancing, and here's you and Mommy eating cake and ice cream together, and this is you with CAKE smooshed all over your FACE!":

Madeleine had a hand-made card for Ethan as well, although, unfortunately, she didn't draw any pictures on her card, because she got too frustrated when she was trying to write her name and wound up with unexpected "U"s and other random letters not in her name, that she gave up and threw her markers in her artist's angst.  So all Ethan got from her was this:

As Ethan began opening the gifts I had gotten him, Julia suddenly became intolerably jealous of the fact that Madeleine was handing him each unopened gift.  Feeling the need to get in on the action, Julia blurted: "Mommy, can I give him the SHIRT?  (stunned silence)  Whoops."

In case you missed it, he got a shirt.  Two of them, in fact.

After gifts, we went out to dinner at our favorite Mexican restaurant in Newton, where Madeleine was willing to abandon her own dinner in order to eat my "chocolate" (aka refried black beans.)  When we got back into the car after our dinner, Julia and Ethan got really invested in dancing around wildly in their seats to the music on one of Ethan's new birthday CDs ("Graceland"), and it was only once we were finally pulling out of our metered parking spot that we discovered another car had been patiently waiting for us to free up the space while 50% of us were too busy with crazy dancing to notice...

Once home, we dug into the chocolate cake and Cool-Whip, but only after Ethan constructed an O-mouthed cake man:

We all wound up eating two pieces of cake each.  I'm pretty sure Madeleine liked it:

Yum, yum!  (In fact, I later found her in a chair, face hovering over the cake, unabashedly taking mouth-bites out of the top of the cake.)

Happy Birthday, Daddy Rowe!!!