Birthday Boy!!!

Today was Kurtis' second birthday and to celebrate the event, Aunt Carrie, Uncle Robert, cousin Alex and Uncle Clate were all here to help us sing, eat lots of cake, ice cream and just have a lot of fun with the birthday boy. I took lots of pictures, including several little videos with my digital camera and Mandy took a whole bunch more pictures too. We have so many photos of today that it's going to be really difficult for me to decide which ones to use to show you how much fun we all had today with Kurtis -and Maya -and for me, having all three of my kids, all three of my grandkids here and everyone just laughing and enjoying the day. No little feuds made it really a bonus day in my book!

My older grandson Alex came home with us on Saturday after the walk and he, Mandy and Maya all went to church this morning. Gram stayed home today because to be honest, my legs and especially my lower back, were really stiff, very sore, aching a whole lot from the almost two miles I walked yesterday. Mind you, I'm not complaining that I did the walk, not at all! But it sure does speak legions about how very out of shape I am!

I fixed two pans of chicken divan for dinner -always a big favorite with my kids and with Alex although normally Kurtis and Maya will not eat this particular dish so Mandy fixed a package of macaroni and cheese -always a standby for those two little ones to eat when the rest of us are relishing a whole different type of meal. Although today, Carrie did get Maya to taste some of her chicken divan and she actually ate a couple bites and even said it was good. I'll take any progress with her in the culinary department anyway I can get it!

Here's Kurtis with his birthday present - a new bike! However, as things like this often go, he seemed to enjoy playing much more with a little calculator of his Mom's and tended to ignore the bike for most of the day. Of course, some of that may have been because Maya really liked the new bike -which is about the same size as one she has that her Pappy Wagner got her about two years ago. Later in the afternoon, she made her dad go upstairs and bring HER bike down so she and Kurt could "ride" together.
Here's Maya, checking out Kurtis' bike for him - just making sure it all works the way it should!

And here's Kurtis trying to figure out just what the heck Maya is doing with his new bike -his birthday present ya know, not hers!

Fortunately, he was in a good mood, inclined towards sharing his toys today and just gave her some second glances but no fisticuffs or harsh words between them. Of course, the fact Kurtis doesn't talk might have some bearing there too, although he can be pretty insistent if someone has something of his that he wants sometimes!!

I decided if I am to show you how things went today, I guess I'll have to bore you to death with several videos here as they run kind of consequetively so to get a full understanding of how our celebration went, you pretty much have to see the whole set of videos. They're each fairly short though - should only bet maybe 30 seconds to barely over a minute each.

The first one here is Mandy presenting Kurtis with his own cake. I had baked two dozen cupcakes and with the batter left over, there was enough there to make an 8-inch cake -not quite as high as it would normally be -so this looks sort of like a flan instead of cake. Mandy iced it and decorated it with three little sugar "matchbox" type cars.


Here's Kurtis as he starts to work on his cake. Notice how slowly and deliberately he goes about picking off the sugar cars first, very little mess, not smearing anything. So nice and neat, isn't he? Wait till you see the rest of these videos! You'll see how he REALLY goes about enjoying his food -and trust me, it ain't neat that he's actually all about either!



Here's Kurtis now as he decides to get a little bit more engrossed in the cake -really savoring the flavor, appreciating the icing and the little sugar cars just a bit more.

Here's Kurtis really getting into the swing of things -reveling, as it were, with the chocolate cake, the icing -well, everything!



Now Maya had to get in on the birthday celebration act too. Note how she decides to move to the end of the table and her response as to why she didn't want to stay seated where she had been initially.



In this little video, as you can see Kurtis really got into the swing of things -literally. Swinging, digging and flinging cake -all over the place! What a mess he had there. Uncle Clate walked by during this aspect of Kurt's enjoyment and asked if Kurtis was trying to pulverize the cake back to being chocolate flour maybe? Sure did look that way. When he was finally all done and we finished getting him cleaned up enough to get him out of the high chair, his dad just took him back to the bathroom and plunked him in the tub, gave him a darned good, much needed bath. He also bathed the chocolate faced little girl in the house then too so by 5 p.m., both kids were bathed and in pj's - all ready for bed! It took Mandy and I three good sweepings to get all the chocolate cake crumbs cleaned up off the dining room floor but you know, mess and all, it was so worth it because of the enjoyment he got out of demolishing that cake (he did eat a darned good bit of it too) and the fun everyone here had watching him dig into the cake and icing and getting so yucky, messy.




While Kurtis was busy ripping his cake apart, the phone rang and it just so happened it was his "Poppy" Ertmer calling from Nevada to wish him a happy birthday too. However, when Mandy put the phone up to Kurtis, he indicated quite vigorously that he wanted no parts of talking to Poppy -or anyone -who thought they were going to interrupt him at his task of eating, throwing and generally creating one huge mess with this project!


And, here's Kurtis with Aunt Carrie as he was trying his level best to smear cake crumbs all over her hat, her face and glasses -even tried to shove it up her nose! Mandy reminded Carrie that at least it was cake he was trying to put up her nose and not the ben-gay that Mandy had used one night to wake Carrie up to get ready to be to work on time for the midnight shift when she and I used to work at the truckstop in Snow Shoe. Yes, Mandy had put a glob of Ben-gay just under Carrie's nose and yes it woke her up with a heck of a start too! Needless to say, she wasn't exactly a happy camper that night when she arrived at work.

Finally - here's Gram -a little bit sunburn on my face from being out in the great sunshine the day before with the walk and looking maybe a trifle tired after taking all these picture, the videos and in general, just having had a great time with my kids and grandkids as we celebrated the big event of Kurtis and his second birthday!