He's Five!

It's hard to believe that the tiny baby who never slept and resembled a tree frog has grown to be this deeply silly and serious boy.  I can't imagine our family without him.

We celebrated his birthday Saturday by putting our house through its inaugural hosting paces.  In a bold move, I decided to invite all of the local extended family.  This way they could all come see our new place and Nels could have some party guests.  There were 20 of us!

And it was fun.  I was so busy that it wasn't until today that the perfectionist in me realized that the guacamole was woefully underseasoned, the chili could have used some more salt, the decaf coffee beans were over roasted to an extremely untasty degree, and the Costco cake wasn't as good as I remembered it being.  I really didn't care, though.  It just felt so good to finally have a house full of happy, talking people.  

My mom came out and was a huge help, washing prep dishes as we went along so things didn't degenerate into total chaos.  I was even more glad of her help after last night, when I had to venture out at 1 am for some Tylenol for Willem.  Drawback #1 of living in a small town:  no grocery stores open 24 hours.  Nels woke up when I got back, so I had to tend to him and lost about an hour and a half of sleep after only getting about 4 1/2 hours the night before.  Imagine my joy when I woke up totally disoriented this morning to the sound of Willem talking TO MY MOM.  Oh, glory.  I slept until almost 10.  She had done the rest of the cleaning up from the party too.  I hope I will be as nice to my kids as the moms in my life are to me.

So today was perhaps the laziest day our family has ever had.  Ever.  We didn't leave the house.  We stayed in our pajamas until well after noon.  Nels was in his new pirate pajamas, so those stayed on until bedtime.  We spent the day laying about, watching Star Wars clips on the computer, watching the boys play Star Wars with the new light sabers, and napping.  Nels was the only one who managed to stay awake all day, fueled by the joy of playing with all of his new things.

It was rainy today, and therefore perfect.  Could there be anything better than a Sunday afternoon nap with the rain coming down?  Well, add to that the satisfaction of yesterday's party going well.  A husband sleeping on the couch because he was worn out from staying up late to clean.  A sick little boy also asleep.  And the recent birthday boy amusing himself for two solitary hours with his new Lego Starfighter.  An altogether very fine weekend.