Happy Birthday!

While we are still in the whirlwind that is our life these days, we tried really hard to take time to really celebrate Sam and Anna's birthdays for what they were and put aside all the other stuff for a little bit.

Our party was the weekend before Sam and Anna's actual birthday. I am glad it worked out that way so we could spend their actual birthday just as the four of us and focus on them rather than party prep or execution.  Party recap coming soon!

The night before their 3rd birthday, we blew up several balloons to have waiting for Sam and Anna when they woke up.  Together we assembled the big presents- balance bikes for the big three year olds.

Thankfully, no vomit or fevers this year for the birthday kids like last year, but poor Anna was sick with a pretty bad cold.  I feel badly for her- out of 3 total birthdays so far, she's been sick for 2 of them.  I'm hoping that we can have a good stretch of healthy birthdays from now on!

We had special pancakes with whipped cream, complete with birthday hats and helium filled balloons for breakfast.

Then it was time to open presents! Some Thomas stuff, puzzles, books, helmets, and of course the balance bikes.  The bikes are something they will grow into, which is just fine because it isn't nice enough to use them outside yet anyway.  I am excited to see Sam and Anna cruise around this summer, and yet I find it so hard to believe that my babies are big enough to have bikes!

I had asked Sam and Anna the day before what special place they wanted to go for their birthday.  The general consensus was that they wanted to go to the history museum to see the lion and dinosaur, so that's what we did.  I was actually pretty excited about that, because they had gone once before with daycare, and I had never been there.  It turned out to be the perfect day to go to the local college's museum of natural history, because they were having  a special event that day that we discovered when we arrived: their 4th annual Collection Crawl, in which the research collections of the natural resources college were on display and presented by faculty and college students- and it was all free!  Not only did we get to check out the cool collections of animals (including a dinosaur that roared when a button was pushed) in the museum of natural history, but we got to explore all sorts of animal stuff up close and even living animals as well.

We checked out the archaeology and paleontology collection first after walking through the museum of natural history.

Next stop was the herpetology exhibition.  This was Sam and Anna's favorite because several students were training an alligator by feeding him marshmallows.  Something they are still talking about.  It was probably my favorite area too because we were able to touch snakes, turtles, bearded dragons and skinks, as well as see toads and salamanders very up close.  There was one student that did an excellent job explaining the animals at exactly the right level for Sam and Anna which was fantastic. I was impressed.

We also checked out the Mammalogy department- looking at dolphin and wolf skulls as well was an extensive collection of mounted animals.

Sam and Anna looked under microscopes at insects in the entomology department.

We saw a huge amount of bird species in the ornithology department.

The Ichthyology department was really neat too.  They had a live shark in a small sized aquarium right next to a lionfish, at Sam and Anna's eye level.  There was hardly anyone else there, so the four of us were able to get right up next to everything.  (We did skip the parasitology area though- I didn't feel a burning need to check out the parasites.)

They even had stickers for kids and face painting too.  So much fun for my animal lovers that it was a perfect way to spend their birthday.

 

 We had cake yet again that evening to cap off a great day!