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.  

The big transition

There’s big news in the Merrill world... We’re moving back to the US!  We’re in the throes of preparing for the move and have only 13 more days until the flight.  This move comes after we’ve been in Bangladesh for nearly three years during this current stint, but after a total of living here 7 of the last 11 years.  Wow.  On July 1 I’m starting a Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) Fellowship with the CDC.  This means that we’re moving to Atlanta and we’ll be there at least 2 years!  We’re so excited about getting this opportunity to move back to the US although these last few days in the Desh are very bitter sweet.  We’re looking forward to peanut butter, cheese, beer, and elbow room but we’re really going to miss the rickshaws, cows, goats, and occasional elephants on the way to work, our quick 5 minute stroll to the American Club and it’s pool, our friends, and most certainly the family we’ve created with the women who come to our house every week day to hang out with the boys.  

Beyond packing boxes, selling extra stuff, and the challenge of saying good byes, Elliot has been busy preparing by starting down the road of potty training. HA!  He’s not even a year old but the ladies keep teasing me that Bangladeshi babies can control when they go potty by this age. I remember hearing this when Henry was younger. Quite frankly I welcome the effort to get Elliot out of diapers, but I’m not banking on a successful campaign.  Regardless, any bit counts. 

Other brotherly fun:
A morning session of bubble blowing - one of Henry's favorites

A crib session

 Ok, I've had enough...please save me Mom!

Shobo Norvo Borsho and more

Henry celebrated the Bengali Shubo Norvo Borsho (Happy New Year), which is on April 14th, at his school.  The celebration was complete with the kids giving a dance performance, face painting, t-shirt painting, and more. Scott and I were able to take off of work and join in the fun.

We watched the performance for awhile before convincing Henry and Jafe to get up on stage. They finally acquiesced...

HA!  They just stood there for the 8 remaining minutes of the stage time.  We were cracking up.

In other news, in early May Henry started swimming confidently all on his own.  We’ve been having so much fun with him in the pool these days now that we get to watch him jump off the side and swim a number of feet to us.  The other day, for the first time ever, Henry started swimming around, beyond just splashing around on the stairs in the shallow end, by pushing off from the bottom stair, going underwater, and turning back to stand on the stairs before we even got in the water.  Then, as we were walking up to the edge to get in, with our friend Jess, one of Henry’s new favorites, who joined us for the afternoon, and Henry said he wanted to jump off the edge to show Jess he could swim.  He not only jumped off and swam, but he took three separate breaths while swimming back to the wall!  Now that is independence!  Ever since this milestone Henry has been even more of a fish.  

 

As soon as Henry could really swim he wanted to go down the slide into the deep end.  He just climbed right up the stairs and went down practically without hesitation.

Now that Henry can swim around on his own (with us nearby of course), we can focus more on getting Elliot accustomed to the water.  He is quite a natural!  He loves splashing around.  If we leave him to figure out how to entertain himself, he immediately will start repeatedly climbing out  and getting back in the pool.  He’ll do this for 10 minutes, easily, finding each out and in, with all the accompanying splashes, so exciting.  He also doesn’t care at all if water gets in his face or if he finds himself suddenly underwater for a second before we pick up up if he accidentally falls in. We betting that he’ll be a natural swimmer like Scott.  

Easter fun - after the fact

I realize I’m a bit tardy in posting about our fun Easter this year but it’s better to put the photos up late than never, right?  Of course, I meant to post this entry before I went on a work trip at the end of April but Life got the best of me.  In fact, there are a number of topics to put up on the blog and they’ll be coming steadily over the coming weeks.  

The Khetran’s hosted another great Easter event this year.  We showed up a bit early to allow Henry and Sophia some time to hang out before the crowd arrived and to help with any of the final preparations.  As usual, Erica had everything under control and there was nothing left to do when we got there.  

Henry and Sophia were the first to decorate cupcakes - and Henry snacked on a few extra sprinkles while doing so.  Henry also decorated a few Easter eggs with stickers.  

As soon as Jafe arrived you can imagine that he and Henry were joined at the hip.

After everyone had arrived and all the adults had a cup of coffee, we headed to the roof for the easter egg hunt.  Even though we got up there fairly early it was starting to get a bit hot.  We gave extra encouragement to the kids to hunt fast in hopes that they’d find the candy before the sun melted it all.  All the kids felt proud of their find.

Elliot just cheered everyone on

After the hunt we went back downstairs for a bit more hanging out and relaxing.  What a success!