Charlie's Third Birthday

Because Charlie fell in love with Star Wars this winter (he has recently begun knee-walking--VERY SLOWLY--around the house telling us he is R2D2), we knew nothing would thrill him more than adding some more Star Wars to his life. Since his third birthday fell on a school/work day he spent the morning with mom & Squish and the real party began when the rest of the family came home for the evening.

We let him open some presents first. He was ecstatic about the cards attached to his gifts. It was really cute--he would just hold them with this awe that someone had given him a card. Grace kept trying to get him to move on to opening the goods, but he really just wanted to enjoy his cards for a while.

Of course when he got to the presents he was pretty into them, too. :) Steve and I gave him a LEGO table for his DUPLOs that Steve DIYed. It is one of Charlie's fav toys now. And we also gave him a DUPLO construction set. He only opened half of his presents because he just wanted to play with them, so he got a second round of gifts the next day. :) 

Dinner was an ordered-in pineapple pizza (guaranteed to get the kids hyper with sheer joy) on the YOU ARE SPECIAL TODAY plate, complete with a showing of The Empire Strikes Back (Charlie had been amazed all week that we were going to let him watch "a new Star Wars!").

Rapt movie-watching, pizza eating, and soda drinking.

And of course--per tradition--Dad delivered a fantastic birthday cake. Baby boy was SO thrilled. He kept asking us to lift him up to look at his R2D2 cake for the entire week after his birthday (even though it was slowly disappearing... into everyone's tummies) because he loved it so much.

Last year the candles really freaked him out (which makes sense--how much of his life have we spent warning him against getting close to hot things?) and made him cry, but this year he really toughed it out and blew out his candles after we sang to him. And then enjoyed the fruits of his (well, technically his Dad's) labors:

(It was a hit.)