Paul's Birthday Weekend!

Baby Paul turned 2 yesterday - he is definitely no longer a baby, but I still call him baby Paul on occasion! And I suppose he will always be my baby! We had a low key weekend of celebrating. On Saturday night, we had friends over for a taco bar and GF chocolate chip cookies. The gathering wasn't planned with Paul's birthday in mind - it was the only free weeknight in Feb we had in common with our friends! But we turned it into a little birthday eve celebration with some birthday singing and Paul's favorite dessert - cookies!

On Sunday morning, Paul opened presents after his typical milk/muffin breakfast. We went very low key and only got him 2 books. We plan to get him some new outdoor toys when the weather warms up so decided to go low key for his birthday. He got a few presents from his teachers at school and family members.

Checking out his new Pookie books - we read them several times that day, especially "Happy Birthday Little Pookie."

He really enjoyed this sorting puzzle from his teachers. It's a great puzzle for fine motor skills and color/shape identification!

It was a beautiful morning so we went on an hour long family walk! We were hoping to see the ducks on the creek but they were all gone!! Paul was pretty disappointed as he loves watching the ducks. But he was cheer up when he got to get out of the stroller and walk on the frozen lake.

After lunch, a facetime session with my parents and my Chicago brother's family, and a (nice long) nap, we headed out to Nana Joan's. She had knee surgery in January and is still working through her recovery so we decided to go to her instead of having her drive to us. Nana Joan was SO excited to spend the afternoon with Paul!

Reading with nana

We asked the grandparents not to get Paul any toys as he got SO many for Christmas (most of which are still in the closet!! We'll pull them out when he gets tired of the toys he has out.) Both sets of grandparents complied and gave money for his college account. My parents also gave him an amazon gift card for some warmer weather toys and nana Joan gave him a Llama Llama book that came with a stuff animal.

I did most of the unwrapping of his gifts, but he's starting to understand the concept as he tried to re-wrap this book after opening it!

The stuffed Llama toy was a hit - he loved carrying it around!

 I made pasta for the birthday dinner since he have a carb-loving little boy!

And we enjoyed more GF chocolate chip cookies (made using the America's Test Kitchen GF cookbook - they are so good that even gluten-eaters enjoy them)! Paul didn't like his cake last year and hasn't liked cake the other times he's tried it recently, so that's why I went the cookie route. This time we put a candle in it as Joan had picked one up for him. He loved having happy birthday sang to him (we sang it to him so many times throughout the weekend!). He didn't understand the concept of blowing out the candle but he seemed to enjoy the attention!

We got home around 7 and Paul went straight to bed after a full day of celebration.

It was a lower key celebration compared to last year when we had a big family party, but I prefer the quieter celebrations at this stage of life. He's too young to appreciate pinterest-worthy parties and I'm just not into party planning so we'll hold off on big celebration until he's older! I'm confident he felt very loved and celebrated!

We are so very, very lucky to have such a healthy, funny, sweet, smart, good-natured little boy!  I'll share a 2-year update next week with more details about what Paul is up to/loving these days, so stay tuned for that!