Mr. Sneaky Pants: Version 5.5

In all the anticipation and planning that has taken place for the last two weeks as Mr. Sneaky Pants neared the day of his half birthday, he made a few simple things very clear.  Most importantly, he didn’t want to have to do any cleaning on his half birthday.  He did not want to have to clean his room, and he did not want to have to clean the family room.  He wanted to play while everyone else cleaned.  Also, he wanted the biggest piece of birthday cake.  Sometime during the day he wanted to go out to a restaurant and have pizza.

So, I arranged all of those things, and he was delighted.  He milked the day for every drop it was worth.  He asked to play downstairs during nap and built a jousting arena where he poked the large stuffed dragon with various swords.  When Greg asked if we were all planning on going to the library, or if I was just going alone, Mr. SP loudly piped up that it was his half birthday, and so he was choosing that everyone would go to the library.  We all went to the library.  (He was especially excited to find the Magic Treehouse series and picked out three chapter books for me to read to him). He requested to stay up a little bit later than his sisters at night, and so he did.

In the afternoon he and The Banana painted some special birdhouses for bird-loving Grandma Kathy.  It was a lot of work to paint the whole pirate ship, but he stuck to it.

The grand finale for the day was getting to eat the very special cake he won at the cakewalk at Sarah’s school last Friday.  We had been carefully saving the cake just for the half birthday celebration.  After despairing that Dr. Peds was only going to give him an average sized piece and dash his expectations of having an especially big piece, Mr. SP ended up with TWO pieces of cake on his plate.  You can see the sinister delight on his face.

The cake was thoroughly enjoyed down to the very last crumb.  All in all, it was a really fun day.  I loved that he really didn’t notice not having any presents (getting to paint the pirate ship was sort of  a present that we are regifting).  Even though he was a bit greedy about the cake, the whole day was more about getting to do special things than a pile of material objects.