Celebrating Three and a Half

My wise friend Siri gave me the idea of celebrating half birthdays long ago when we were talking about how YaYa and Mr. SP  both have birthdays that kind of get swallowed up in the festivities of major holidays (Christmas and Thanksgiving).  For years we’ve been marking half birthdays with a few special activities, like choosing what food you want to eat, and going somewhere special during the day.  Like real birthdays, we often make a cake or have some sort of special sweet treat,  and the big kidlets get out of evening work.

Last year I completely forgot to celebrate half birhtdays.  I heard a lot about that when the real birthdays came along and the kidlets realized that they had missed the half way mark for their year.

This year we are on track.  Mr. Trouble on Feet has been waiting to celebrate himself for months.  He loved his third birthday, and  has been watching every other person in the family have a birthday right in a row these past few months.  While he is actually a great celebrator (no complaining as long as the birthday person shared their cake) he was really excited to have a turn with his birthday.   A half birthday celebration was just the thing!  After sending the big kids off on the school bus, we read picture books and then headed off to the children’s museum.

We hadn’t been to the children’s museum for a long time, so it was fun to explore some of his favorite things to do there:  digging in the dinosaur sand, dressing up, and pretending to be a banker.  He loves the big purple “sail boat” which has wheels and pedals and jet engines.  He picked vegetables from the garden for me to eat, and protected me from unfriendly dragons.

On our way home we stopped to get bread at the bakery and went to the grocery store to pick out helium balloons.  That was his big request:  helium balloons and cake.  He spent his free time in the afternoon running around the house at top speed with his balloons clipped onto the back of his pants, pretending they were jet packs.  It was pretty adorable.

It was mostly a normal Wednesday afternoon:  oboe lessons for YaYa, homework for big kids, getting ready for AWANA and Bible Study, but Mr. Trouble on Feet was enormously excited the whole day.  He was thrilled about the very ugly, lopsided chocolate layer cake we had for dessert after supper.  My mother would have been appalled at its ugliness, but it didn’t taste too bad, actually.  We took some cake to share with friends at Bible study, and listened to a new CD in the car.

One of the best things about age three is that it just doesn’t take much to make a kid really happy.  (Of course, there’s the flip side:  it also doesn’t take much to make a three year old unhappy either.)