Dino-Mite Birthday

We had a much more successful party for J this year, thankfully.  He actually enjoyed himself rather than just his guests.  Of course, we only invited one family.  The family he bonded with over the summer because he went to swim at their house every week.  So there was really only one friend which was his age.  The other kids are friends with the girls.  Somehow that seems to make it all less threatening to him, for some reason.

But whatever.  I was just happy that he was happy.

The cake was really fun to make.  It was easier than I thought it would be to cut cake pieces to form the dinosaur body.  Of course, it helped that I had a nice cheat sheet printed from coolest-birthday-cakes.com.  And that Grammy was here to hold fussy baby B.

I started out thinking I was making a stegosaurus.  And the body sort of fits with that.  But the kids informed me that the tail was more like an anklyosaurus.  And the head, well, the head doesn't really look like any dinosaur at all.  More like a crocodile . . . with a spiky necklace on.

Then J piped up and said, "It's a J-saurus!"  We liked that classification.

The idea of presents had J in a mild frenzy of excitement for hours, even before the guests arrived.  It was all we could do to convince him that he needed to wait until the end of the party to open them.

During a lull in the party action, he took the opportunity to build a tower out of his gifts, topping it all off with our magic toy wormy.

Everyone enjoyed the dino inflatables, even B.  And she actually smiled long enough for me to snap a picture.  Usually her grins are so quick, and make her wiggle so much that my photos turn out blurry.

We really only had a few activities planned.  Considering the fact that we had this party only a week after my surgery, we figured laid back would be a necessity.

The kids dug for dinosaur skeletons in the sand box.  The big kids found one they liked, pocketed it, and then disappeared to play in their room.  J and R wanted to bury theirs again and again so they could dust them off like real archeologists.

Our other main attraction (well, besides the cake), was clay.  Shaggy showed the kids how to work with it, how to combine different colors to make cool effects, and how to press it onto little frames he had made.

The idea was for each of the kids to make their own creative dinosaur.  Which most of them did wonderfully well.  But if you notice from the photo, one of these is decidedly NOT like the others.

That would be J, once again bucking conformity and choosing his own path.  No cool dino for him.  Nope.  He insisted on making a pumpkin.  Which he was delighted with.  And I guess that's all that really matters.

R had a great time at this party.  Partly because J was too distracted to pester her.  But also because she had FOUR big sisters to cater to her every whim.  She is totally opposite J in this regard.  She LOVES being the center of attention.  The more attention the better.

J's only real show of anxiety came when it was time to serve cake.  He ran from the room and hid for a while.  Which seemed odd as he is a sugar fiend and adores frosting.  The cake itself is entirely optional in his mind.  Once we were able to coax him into talking, we discovered that he just didn't want us to sing happy birthday to him.  OK.  Pretty easy fix.  And then he was able to finish out his party with a smile on his face.

Happy birthday to my little bug, who is somehow not so little anymore.