Celebrating Joel

Since birthdays are a pretty big deal around here, we knew we had to make Joel's extra special. His brother and sister are old enough to have big parties with all of their friends, but he's still at that age where it's pretty much just a family celebration. So, we planned a few fun things - pleasing a four year old is quite easy!

For months, he'd been saying he wanted to go to "Mariodonalds" (I believe that's a combination of Marianos the grocery store and McDonalds). I would distract him in order to prevent a typical three year old meltdown by saying that maybe we'd go there for his birthday. Well, unlike his siblings, this kid remembers EV-ER-Y-THING! The day before his birthday, he reminded me that he had plans to go to "Mariodonalds". Though we had already made plans for later in the day, our morning was wide open, so we decided to make it a pancake breakfast and playtime date with our close friends, the Gilberts. The kids played for almost two full hours and had a blast! They were happy to climb all over the indoor playset and we were happy they burned some of that built up wintertime energy!

By the time we got home, the kids were quite hungry, so we made Joel one of his favorite foods - hot dogs! We ended the meal with Zebra Cakes, which he had picked out at the store several weeks prior. He's a big fan of anything zebra related, so finding little cakes with a zebra on the box was about as exciting as it gets in the world of a preschooler!

For the family celebration, we thought it would be fun to take the kids ice skating. They've never gone before and I found a great deal at the ice rink I grew up going to. Unfortunately, Joel was quite excited to go, but totally chickened out once we got there. He was quite happy to sit and hang with Nana Pam and Grandma though! The other two had a blast! They were terrified at first and it took about twenty minutes to make it one time around the edge of the rink. Eventually, they got very brave and had fun skating (and falling) around in the middle of the rink. They both are already begging to do it again sometime soon!

Since the skating rink was a bit far from home, we decided to just go out to dinner to celebrate. We went to one of our favorite restaurants in that area (where we also happened to have our wedding shower ELEVEN YEARS AGO!!!) called Flossmoor Station. Grandpa, Grandma, Nana Pam, and TiTi joined us for dinner and it was wonderful getting to be together as a family to celebrate one spectacular four year old!!! This little boy has just about every single one of his birthday guests wrapped around his finger, so celebrating him was a joy for us all!