Birthday bliss

I'm finally to the birthday post!  At least while the boys are young and not sensitive about sharing everything, we have things pretty easy with birthday celebrations.  We start the momentum off slowly with Scott's birthday in March, turn it up just a little with my birthday in April, then go full force with Henry's birthday in mid May and finish off the fun with Elliot's birthday on June 1.  This year, by the time we got to Henry's birthday we were ready to parrr-tay which meant that Henry was spoiled with quite a number of Henry-centric events.  He felt like a big 3 year old king for awhile.  In fact, he got so good at celebrating his birthday that Elliot had to share some of the limelight with his older brother during his own 1 year old festivities.  Note, in the next photo Henry is opening Elli's present.  This might be a typical sibling thing, but it is definitely aided by the birthday schedule.

For Henry's birthday party with his other ~3 year old friends, I took the opportunity to have the ayah help host a party and, like last year, had the party one afternoon during the week.  The afternoon progressed as usual, with the same set of friends coming over, but Henry had the surprise of people giving him gifts and then we, of course, sang him Happy Birthday.  These play groups make me laugh whenever I stumble upon them at my house if I come home early from work.  There's always the 4 "older" girls (~4 yrs old) doing their girl-y things while Henry and Jafe run around making noise and fighting off monsters.  If Jafe gets distracted Henry will slink off to some corner to play with his dinosaurs and the like.  In the photo here Henry wanted to color so I gave all the kids the supplies but Henry didn't hold his ground. It's all in good fun and the kids are great friends...but the photos are quite funny. There's another one below of Scott braving the crowd.

Doing puzzles

He carried around his new toothbrush for awhile...who would have thought that present would go over so well.  The other popular gift, a set of slick goggles from the Beckmans.  Those have had a lot of use!

Cake and snack time!  If you look closely you can just barely see Henry way off in the back, closer to that window.  I cracked up when I noticed that a few minutes after the candles were blown out, Henry snuck off to play at his table, avoiding the "jamala" (chaos) of all the fun at the table - so classic.  He didn't even eat a piece of cake!

The next generation: Elliot with Shipi (our nanny), Gemma (the Beckman's daughter - we did Peace Corps with the Beckmans here in Bangladesh and they too returned, just recently) with Shobita (our maid), and Leon with his nanny (the son of our good friends who have an older daughter with whom Henry has always played. Scott and Leon's dad met when we were here for my PhD research).

 The brothers hanging, and bonding, out after all the excitement died down

On Friday, our weekend and Henry's actual birthday, we opened a few presents in the morning we headed to the club to swim.  This year Henry got some bug figurines, modeling / bake-able clay, a book, and....   Matching shirts for the boys!  

What morning could possibly be complete without a bacon break? Certainly not a birthday morning.

In the afternoon Jess came over.  Henry and Jess wiled away the afternoon making trees and dinosaur eggs with Henry’s new bake-able clay and reading Henry’s new books. 

Then, Jess surprised Henry with dinosaur themed, ie green and brown, cupcakes. Awesome.

Finally, on Saturday we went to Pollobi’s house were Pollobi, her family, and apartment - mates threw Henry a surprise party complete with a cake. The cake component is really exciting since she doesn’t have an oven.  She explained to me later with a smile that she made the cake in a pressure cooker on her burner.   

 PHEW!

While Elliot didn't have the same number of Elliot-centric events, we'd all like to think the birthday extravaganza was just as memorable.  Elli turned 1 on the day we flew back from a relaxing family vacation in Thailand.  That day we made sure to open a present but in truth he wasn't feeling to well.  When he got better we gave him a classic "Birthday at the pool" experience.  Elli is proving to just love the water. He entertains himself with climbing repetitively in and out of the pool and if I throw him up and let him fall under the water he just doesn't care.  I hope we find a neighborhood pool in Atlanta!

 Such a Scott face!!

"Can't I be like my Dada (big brother in Christian Bengali, oddly enough it means Paternal father in muslim Bengali)?"

I realized as I wrote this that I never wrote about my birthday back in April.  I actually spent my birthday on a flight to the US (kid free!) so we celebrated the event the day before.  Pollobi made a cake and a whole batch of donuts :)  We sang and had cake with our neighbors before Scott and I went out for a drink, as he led me to believe.  It turns out he had teamed up with some friends to throw a surprise party!! What a blast we had!  I even got to karaoke, impromptu, to Baby Got Back - now that was a birthday treat.