Lots of birthday fun!

We celebrated 2 birthdays in the last week. Benjamin is now 2 and I continue to be 30 something (although, I guess you could figure out my age from the above picture). Benjamin did a spectacular job blowing out the candles on his cake. He managed to get the 2 little ones and the big number 2 all by himself. He was in hog heaven with all his new toys. He got a baseball set from us, a tunnel from Grandma and Grandpa Hested, Play-Doh and some cool balls from Grandma Mindy, and a fun zebra pillow from Aunt Dude. He also received some Baby Einstein videos from Aunt Jennie and Grandma and Grandpa Buckley. Those should be perfect when he is in the hospital for his surgery. He had a ball running between the baseball tee and the tunnel. Then he would take a break and run for a puzzle or another ball. He was not very happy when it was time to go to bed since he was totally wired from all the excitement.

His surgery is scheduled for Monday, January 14. He has a pre-op appointment with the doctor on January 9th. The nurse said to be sure to remind the doctor to include orders about Benjamin's feeding tube when he writes up the orders for the hospital. I was worried that they would waste time scrambling to figure out his feeding tube after the surgery is all done. As Sean pointed out, we can always bring his from home as a back-up plan.

One other quick note about Benjamin...Every time he sees me working on this blog, he starts shouting, "Go, go, go." That means that he wants to see the video of him walking. He has watched it MANY times!

Alex continues to be a busy third grader. Last week, he received his gold medal from the Accelerated Reader program. He also passed his Whiz Kids math test. On that test, he has to do 100 addition and 100 subtraction problems in 9 minutes and get them all correct. Yesterday, the third grade class went to see The Nutcracker at a downtown theater. It sounds like he enjoyed it. I wasn't sure what he would think about ballet, but he didn't come home and say it was boring. On top of all that, he's studying his lines for his role as Santa.

Emma cracked me up last night. I told her and Alex that they each need to go through their toys, etc and find 5 things to give to Goodwill. This project has Emma a little worried since she "likes to play with ALL her stuff." She spent 20 minutes looking last night and managed to come up with 2 plastic rings. I guess she'll have to try again today.