Six

On the morning of his sixth birthday, Willem said "I wish for a pet tarantula," and blew out the candle on his doughnut. Then he opened his present.

While Willem was completely in love with his new friend at first, he has become increasingly discontent with the fact that the spider is not real. He's taken to moping around the house and sighing, "I'll never get a real spider for a pet." Being thus reminded (by himself) that his will has been thwarted, Willem adopts a mood I like to call "Belligerent Eeyore." Belligerent Eeyore is a very trying mood.

Once we had the house all decorated and the Happy Birthday sign up on the party day, Willem told his brother to sit by the fireplace for a picture. Then he disappeared down the stairs for five minutes. When he returned, he seated himself at the other end of the fireplace. And held up the word bubble he'd just made. Quite the director.

Willem picked out a craft for his monster-themed party: the boys made little monster hand puppets from kits. It was pretty awesome, but it would have been even better if it had taken them more than 10 minutes to finish. And if we had planned some games. It was basically 10 minutes of calm followed by 1 hour and 50 minutes of mayhem.

This is Willem's best buddy from pre-school last year. I love his "more is more" approach. He basically piled every sticker he could get his hands on onto that sucker.

"Everybody take one step back. Everybody take one step back. Everybody take one step back." That was the mantra of the gift-opening time. Any closer and Willem would have been in the fireplace. Here he's just opened one of his favorite books, Ghostopolis. I blame his word-bubble preoccupation on an early introduction to graphic novels.

I love that the boys raided the costume bin in Willem's room and wore various guises throughout the party. Here they are oohing and aahing over glow-in-the-dark eyeballs from Grandpa Scott and Grandma Juli.

And one of Willem's two favorite gifts, glow-in-the-dark fangs.

We had fun drawing monster faces on all the balloons, which you really can't see. You can, however, read Willem's word bubble on the balloon in the foreground. Give me cake.

The cake was obviously Shaun's doing. He went off-theme (but equally beloved) with a spider.

There was one other favorite present, but I'm having technical difficulties with the video of it. (If you're my friend on Facebook, you saw it.) I'll put that up in another post if I can get it figured out.

I am super glad to have the birthday parties behind us, but it was fun to celebrate our birthday boy.

Our one-of-a kind.