Kate's First Birthday!

Kate first birthday, on March 25, 2000, was a fun day. She started it by waking up in the middle of the night, asking for a midnight snack. I wished her a happy birthday and nursed her, and she slept on. The day itself, we kept it quiet, just doing a family celebration. We started the day by having her siblings give her their presents. She was kind of at a loss about what to do with it, but luckily, the other kids were more than willing to assist her in this matter! Jane was so helpful that she unpacked Kate's present for her! Luckily, Kate isn't at an age yet, that she cares about that, she just basked in all the attention showered on her.

Kate being showered with gifts by her siblings	Kate unwrapping and admiring a gift

Cees (8yo) gave her a nice, big, green ball. Tim (6yo) gave her a Duplo box with Indians, including a teepee, which he immediately opened for her, so that she could play with it. Tara (3yo) later let daddy build it exactly like the specs on the front of the box. Tara's present was no-spill bubble containers with wands, so that we could blow a lot of bubbles on her birthday. These were a huge success. Kate mostly sucked them and tried to blow bubbles, but only managed a few small ones. The picture on the bottom of her 1yo update shows how she used it :-) But she really enjoyed watching the bubbles the other ones blowed for her. Jane (2yo) was the biggest lover of the bubbles, she was holding a container almost the whole day. Jane (2yo) gave Kate a nice, wooden, triangle puzzle, with 3 big pieces, a dog, a cat and a fish. They have big handles to pick them up with and Kate was very fascinated with them :-) Daddy had another wooden puzzle for her, same kind, but this time with 4 different kinds of fruit. Mommy got her 2 neat board books, one about dinosaurs, the other with animal sounds. Grandma and granddad sent her a pound-a-ball toy, in which you can use a hammer to hit 4 balls through it. This one was popular with all the kids.

Kate, Tim and Tara playing with the pound-a-ball	Tara blowing bubbles	Kate outside

Not only did we celebrate Kate's birthday today, but we also had somebody come over to take some trees on our property down. Especially the boys were fascinated by seeing him use the chain saw and watching a tree fell down. Of course Timmy immediately got worried when he saw that the tree fell over the driveway 'Now how can we leave the house, if the driveway is not useable?' :-) He did saw it in pieces though and take it off the driveway. He also sawed the trees we lost last year, into pieces. They were huge trees which went down during a wind storm. We were very grateful that they had fallen away from the house! We used them as climbing trees for the kids, but they were kind of in the way. Now we have big pieces of tree with which we plan to build something for the kids to climb on/ play in. We joked and said that we had the tree worker come over to celebrate Kate's birthday and make her real big building blocks :-)

If you look careful at the picture on the right, you can see the tree worker sawing the fallen down trees in pieces with his chain saw. He is in between the 2 bushes. It made quite a lot of noise!

During the afternoon, we spent some time making a birthday cake for Kate. The kids helped with preparing it and we didn't even have many egg shells in it! We did have the normal fighting about who could put in things first etc, but nothing major. It was a chocolate cake and I put some frosting on it later. It wasn't very fancy, but she is too young to complain about that yet. It tasted good though!

Kate really enjoyed the birthday cake, although she insisted on eating with her bubble wand instead of a fork. Oh well, she was the birthday girl after all, so she had some special compensations for things like that :-)

Kate on the table...	The cake	Eating cake

We had a pretty good day, but both Kate and Jane were suffering from bad colds, which changed into croup that night. Kate had a lot of stridor during the night and was pretty pathetic. Jane was less affected, but still sick and her grumpiness level went way up. It was a pity that it happened on her birthday, but oh well, that's how these things go. At least it is better than when Tim had the chicken pox on his third birthday.