Done Worse

Yes, it’s true. It turns out that if you’re born, and you are lucky enough to be healthy and someone is nice enough to take care of you for 365 days – even though you cry a lot and you aren’t potty trained and you tend to wake everyone up during the night screaming – you turn 1 exactly a year later.

Not wanting to break with tradition – or the laws of physics – Jackson did just that on August 28th.

Wooo-hoooo!

And not only did he celebrate his birthday on one day: no, that would not be enough for our boy, he celebrated it for two whole days!!

The first day of celebration was on his actual birthday, Friday. It is daycare tradition to bring in cupcakes for the kid’s birthdays. However, Mike and I are “those parents”, and we don’t really want AJ eating cupcake at this stage in his life. So, every other kid’s birthday, we’ve told them “NO CUPCAKES” and he gets grapes or Cheerios or some other equally lame thing that parents like us insist on instead. This, of course, posed a bit of dilemma when his birthday came up: we wanted to share with others, but we’re known as the anti-cupcake people.

Fortunately, my mother solved the dilemma for us: blueberry muffins! They have fruit so they’re healthy and they look like a cupcake so kids will want to eat them. Done and done! Jackson was not only fortunate enough to celebrate with his daycare buddies, but Grandma and Grandpa Graven came too. Apparently it was fun muffin mayhem for all to see.

So what happened for the second day of birthday fun?

On Saturday, we went to the beautiful National Aquarium in Baltimore, with all four grandparents and a wonderful assortment of friends. We looked at fish, we looked at sharks, we looked at bubbles, we looked at other kids and then, for super extra fun, we saw the dolphin show! A great time was had by all.

And to finish it all off, we went to a wonderful Italian restaurant and had delicious pastas and pizzas for dinner. Jackson finished it all off with a birthday cannoli. At first he was dubious and refused to open his mouth. But once he tasted the delicious goodness of that which is cannoli, I could not stuff it into his face fast enough. At one point I feared he would suck my fingers right off of my hands. Fortunately this did not come to pass, as that would have really changed the tenor of the day.

All in all it was a wonderful, extended birthday celebration and if I’ve understood this whole time passing/Earth spinning/person growing correctly, I hear he’s going to have another one next year on the exact same day.

Who knew?

Photos from both of his b-day parties, opening presents, the aquarium and dinner at the restaurant can be seen here at: Happy Birthday, Jackson

Photos from the rest of the month of August can be seen here at: Awesome August photos