The Birthday Boy!

On March first, our sweet little Joel turned three years old!  I have been neglecting sharing his celebration with you, but wanted to make sure we posted some pictures of our big boy before we head out on spring break!

His birthday was a Monday, and while Jim had to go to school, it was a beautiful day, and we started the celebration early, just the three of us.  He even got some candles in his lunch!

  We headed outside for some bike riding in the cul-de-sac in the morning.  Joel enjoyed the bike, but the bigger draw was the puddles!  So after getting soaked we came in for hot cocoa.  

It's hard to believe sometimes how big they are getting!  But so much fun too.

We had a family come for dinner to help celebrate.  The Corman's have been great friends to us this year, and Joel and their son, Kaeden, who is only a few days younger, are great friends.  And now Joel loves him even more, since he brought gifts of Lightning McQueen and Mater!  (From the Cars movie.)

Joel chose which of his trucks he wanted me to draw on the cake.  I was thankful it was a simpler one! He has always loved trucks.

Waiting for cake is pretty exciting!

So proud of his cake and being a big boy!

Kaeden is such a great encouraging friend to Joel.  It is fun to watch Joel develop friendships just as his sister did around this age.

The following weekend, Grandma and Grandpa joined in for another celebration.  Can't have too many parties!  And they must have gotten the memo too, because Joel was lucky enough to get even more Cars figures!  He sure loves anything with wheels, and although he's only seen the movie a few times, he just loves the characters and loves to talk about the story.

It was fun to make another cake for him.  He's been asking for a giraffe cake for a few months, and after scouring the internet for ideas, I came up with this.  It is such a delight to bless our children by granting their wishes for (some!) things.  It was fun to see his face when he saw his long-awaited cake.

Something else that Joel loves is reading.  He got books for his birthday and took time to look through each one before getting another present.  I love that both he and Faith enjoy looking at books for hours sometimes.  It's hard to believe that soon Faith will be reading to us!

Another hit of the night was a train conductor hat, scarf, and whistle from his Grandmom.  He is so proud of it, and loves to wear them all day.

It was so much fun to celebrate Joel with our family, many times over.  I especially cherished celebrating this year, as it was comfortable and familiar.  It was easy to get balloons from Walmart and make cake and icing from ingredients that are easy to find, and have family and friends over like we were used to.  Celebrating in Kenya next year will probably take a little creativity, won't feel like the past years, and will be different, but we can look forward to treasuring that too.