Birthday Surprises

Do birthdays and three-day weekends ever turn out like you imagine?

I imagined we’d be in Rhode Island for one last summer hurrah and to celebrate Noah’s 3rd birthday poolside with my parents and in-laws.

I’m glad we made the most of our summer adventures before Labor Day, because we’ve been house bound since Thursday with pneumonia, except for a few brief but memorable daily outings:

1. Saturday: A trip to Whole Foods where I bought reusable shopping bags and nothing else, because I simply ran out of energy.
2. Sunday: A one mile walk to Sleepy’s. My husband is fed up with our too soft pillow top bed and during an ill-timed burst of energy, I agreed to go mattress shopping with him. This is a terrible idea if you have been sleeping upright on the couch for three nights to pacify your cough. I tried one mattress for 10 seconds before coughing so much I had to exit the store, leaving my husband to choose our bed for the next 20 years.
3. Monday: A trip to iParty to buy replacement balloons for the birthday boy after a very sad birthday mishap, during which I cruelly kept taking photographs.4. Now that the antibiotics have really kicked in, we had a much more successful trip to Whole Foods yesterday, where my kids met my cooking/Clean Food guru, Terry Walters. We also bumped into Noah’s favorite teacher Janice, which truly perfected his birthday, plus a few other friends which made me so grateful to be back in the world of the almost-healthy.

Noah’s third birthday was sweet and simple. We were technology-free, except for some music we played while popping bubbles shooting out of Noah’s amazing new bubble machine which Dad and Ryan picked out at Kiddlywinks.

As with most activities, swords and flyswatters found their way into our bubble popping dance party – this time, it was quite an impressive fine + gross motor activity for all of us (the most exercise I’ve had in a week).

By repeated request, we’ve read this book to Noah a hundred times in the last few month:

It’s one of the few books, Ryan, our beginning to read kindergartener, has picked up and voluntarily “read” to Noah when we weren’t looking. The combination of pictures and words in the “secret” birthday message make the book a great literacy tool for preschoolers and early readers.

I left a secret message for Noah in our mailbox, very much like the one that leads the birthday boy in the book to his new puppy.

My drawing is not great, but Noah (and his Dad) got the idea: Start at the mailbox. Go down the hill (our driveway). You will see a hula hoop. Go in. Follow the path to the rock mat. Above it, you will see a door. Open it. Go up the stairs. You will see a tunnel (I set up a tent tunnel in the hallway leading to Noah’s room). Crawl through. Find the house.

No real live puppy for us but this was waiting for Noah in his room, in the doll house a neighbor generously handed down just in time for Noah’s birthday.

Noah thought the puppy was cute, but liked the scavenger hunt better, asking to do that part again, while also later requesting that Scott take the dog to work with him.

In the end, there were Mickey Mouse waffles with whipped cream, lots of cake, smiles and giggles, a whole lot less coughing, and a happy birthday boy who greeted his daddy with “I’m three now” in the morning and cuddled close to me at bedtime. I couldn’t have planned it any better.