September is celebration month

My brother's birthday was Friday, Chris's is on the 12th, Oliver's is on the 29th and thrown into the mix is my anniversary on the 13th...Chris and I didn't plan this all so well....

Because I'm due on October 3, Chris agreed to a dual birthday party with Oliver and I agreed to keeping it immediate family only. After last year's party where we invited everyone young and old who had touched our lives the first year of our baby's life, it took a lot of self-restraint to really keep this year's party small. There were no invitations printed on Shutterfly, no gaggle of adorable babies, no balloons, no decorations. Instead, Chris's parents and brother joined us on the back deck for a dinner of grilled chicken and corn on the cob, baked mac 'n' cheese (a favorite of both Chris and Oliver) and salad, followed by homemade cupcakes (for Oliver) and a Dairy Queen cake (for Chris). The 75-slide Powerpoint slideshow I had prepared for Oliver's first birthday depicting the first year of his life was replaced with a display of photos from the second year attached to a closeline. Can you believe I only chose 35?

Being forced to keep it simple ended up being a blessing. Oliver had no clue we were celebrating his birthday and no interest in opening presents or even eating any cake, so having a ton of people over wouldn't have made him more into his birthday. With the pressure off, we could enjoy conversation and what he wanted to do, which included chasing our neighbor's chickens that had gotten into our yard. He obliged us by sitting for a rendition of Happy Birthday, (and reached for the burning candles!) but was presumably too full from dinner to want to eat even a piece of cupcake (and presumably was not expressing an opinion about my baking ability). He said no to multiple requests to open presents and would have been very content to keep playing with the train cutouts that had decorated his cupcakes or the car-shaped picture frame I had placed on top of his presents. So Chris and I ended up opening all his presents for him, which he did get into when he saw what was in the boxes, particularly the train book and the wooden train set.