Happy Birthday, Adam!

My son Adam turned two years old today. We celebrated this momentous occasion - the onset of the "terrible twos" - with a party featuring his best friend, his cousins, an ice cream cake, a thousand percussive devices, and, of course, a giant plush Nemo.

I'm too beat from the birthday festivities to write much right now, so enjoy the pictures:



While Adam has long loved anything with a ball (ball sports sometimes create some real linguistic hillarities: since you play tennis with a tennis ball and golf with a golf ball, Adam has decided that you must play baseball with a "baseball ball", football with a "football ball", basketball with a "basketball ball", etc.) his most enduring passion so far has been music. Here he is, playing with the snare drum that he made himself by sticking loose change into a plastic tub, while listening to Miles Davis and looking at one of my Jazz encyclopedias. He loves playing any drum, but his favorite instrument to listen to is either the saxophone or the clarinet. He knows that Jeff Coffin plays both of those with Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, and he knows that Mama plays the clarinet. His favorite sax players are Paul Desmond and John Coltrane, but his favorite drummer is Chappy! I wonder where he got his good taste!



Here he is just before bed one night last week, wearing his Thomas the Train pajamas (it's been so much easier to get him to bed since we've been able to say, "Hey Adam, why don't you put on you train pajamas?!?") and my running shoes, playing with my tennis racket. He just loves trying to fill my size 13 shoes. Hopefully that isn't a theme for the rest of his life.



Here he is, playing in his room at the birthday party, with a friend and his cousins. Our neighbor, the friend's mom, looked in and said, "That looks like the makings of a great garage band!"



Here's a chocolate lipped Adam blowing out the candles on his cake (both of them!) with Daddy "helping" slightly. For the record, Sami got the cake from Graeter's Ice Cream: Black Raspberry Chip ice cream, with chocolate cake and a fudge center. There's still some in the freezer if you want any. But you'd better hurry, before I eat it all myself.



Of course, the best part of a birthday party is the presents! Here are Adam and his cousin Caleb tearing into one of the many gifts - a Thomas the Train set.



Growing a year older is so exhausting. Here's Adam crashing on the couch with Daddy and three balloons (perhaps the highlight of the party - I may never be rid of them!), plus his Christmas present "Big Elmo" (one of two Elmos he got this year) and his birthday present, a giant, plush Nemo. I think we're trying to watch Wallace and Gromit, but as you can see from my glazed-over expression, I may be wrong. Mostly I was watching the back of my eyelids.

Special thanks to Sami, who took so many pictures that she forgot to be a part of any of them. Or, maybe that was her plan all along...