Tamlin's birthday thoughts

Tamlin's turned 3 years old! Wow. He has gotten so big so fast and I scarce can believe he's already three. This is a great age where he has his own opinions and observations and is not afraid to share them with anyone who will listen.

We had a birthday party for our little man on the weekend before Thanksgiving. It was mostly a celebration where his friends can come over, chat, play, and eat cake and home-made chili. The guest roster included friends from my school, kid friends he often plays with, and my sister and her new family. I tried hard to keep it simple with a four step plan or gathering / dancing, gifts, lunch, playing, cake.

Of course, Tamlin wanted a car theme, again. He got to help pick out the birthday cake (with a race car topper). I decorated with balloons, streamers, and car decorations. I hung a set of streamers at the entryway at the bottom of the stairs so Tam saw these immediately when he came down on his birthday morning. This elicited an excited "Wooowwww!" from him that warmed my heart.

All the toys were hits. His cousin Ciearra "helped" quite a bit with the actual opening of the gifts, but he didn't seem to mind. Tamlin loved running around and interacting with everyone.
I think maybe his geotrax train from Nana and Papa might have been his favorite toy :-)

The cake was great. It was totally worth the money to pay the store to make and decorate the cake in such a fantastic fashion. Tam thought it was AWESOME. He did a great job at trying to keep his fingers out of the frosting until after we had sung him the birthday song, but I could see this was definitely a hard thing for a newly 3 year old to do. I made sure to have the number candle for him, since I had always wanted these when I was little. The cake had a ton of blue frosting which resulted in many little blue mouths and tongues. Extremely silly.

Overall, the party went well and everyone seem to have a great time. Afterwards, I made sure that Tamlin helped with writing the thank you cards to everyone. He "wrote" thank you with pen and stamped all over them. Good boy.

Christmas decorating

On the day after Thanksgiving, we continued our tradition of breaking out the Christmas decorations and putting up the ol' tree. I had Brian haul up the 4 big boxes of Christmas gear and out two trees (don't worry only one is a full size tree). Tamlin helped with everything. "I'm a good helper, daddy!" he frequently exclaimed. We took pictures of Tam helping put the tree together and some of the first ornaments being placed...but we quickly realized that the camera was missing its memory card :-( An easy remedy and still plenty of decorations to go...plus Jude woke up from a quick nap and was able to "help" too.

I love decorating the tree: unwrapping the ornaments one by one and remembering the reason or memories behind each one. It is really special to me that all of ornaments (except the colored balls) were purchased with care or given as gifts. Sometimes they're for big events like a glass castle for our first Christmas in our own house, and sometimes they are silly like our puffy bird that looks like it is going to explode that just makes me laugh, and sometimes they are just "us" like our moose family ornaments. A few ornaments are remnants of my childhood like glittered pine cones that I made or my personalized brass ornaments. All of them just seem to make the tree look awesome...as you just want to stare and stare to see it all! Brian thinks we have so many ornaments that we need to get a rotating tree stand so that we can decorate the tree in 360.

Since Jude is just starting to sit up, we made sure to put all the safe ornaments near the bottom so that he could check them out up close. He was really fascinated with the lights, and loved kicking the low branches with his feet.

We finished the tree with our moose tree-skirt and set up Tam's train to go around the base. Awesome.
The other little tree goes in our family room and I let Tam decorate it completely with its own little ornaments. The rest of the decorations were placed with care around the house, which made everything festive. Lastly, we hung up the stockings. Mom came through for us and whipped up Jude's stocking early, so we had it to hang. She had made all of our stockings in previous years too. The downside is that we lacked a stocking hook to put Jude's with ours on the fireplace mantle. The problem was solved by hooking the stocking on Jude's jumperoo! He checked it out and loved it :-)

This year is the first year that Tamlin really "gets" Christmas in all of its glory...Santa, presents, Merry Christmas, Baby Jesus's birthday...the whole shebang. I absolutely cannot wait until the holiday gets here to share our the wonder and happiness with my entire family!