Alden Turns Three!

Alden is three years old! Ask him and he'll emphatically tell you so too, with 3 little fingers extended. He is now just over three feet tall, and weighs about 30 lbs. He'd been looking forward to his birthday for a week, and getting so excited when boxes in the mail arrived addressed to him. We threw him a party on the 17th because it was MLK day and a lot of folks had the day off. On that morning, he woke to this awesome train set (from Uncle Aaron and Aunt Liz) already assembled on the living room floor. After playing with it for most of the morning, he was whisked away by Ilana's Dad for a Reny's/grocery store adventure so we could get the house ready for the party.

We'd been getting pretty excited too and made plans for his first themed birthday party. Alden really likes frogs and asked for a froggy birthday. We decorated our dining room to look like a pond and put his frog cake in the center.Every day for weeks before the party, Ilana would ask Alden what kind of cake he wanted. The frog theme predominated, although close to the actual event a giraffe was mentioned. As for cake flavor, his requests were for vanilla about 70% of the time and chocolate 30% of the time. The frog-shaped cake was a design by Ilana and ultimately was a yellow cake with hedge-betting chocolate cupcakes for eyes. (This saved us as Alden ultimately went with chocolate when it came time to cut the cake). The frosting was a fondant with green tea (matcha) for coloring. All was made lovingly from scratch with no artificial colors or ingredients. Making a "natural" fondant icing was tough. This frosting takes on the consistency of play-doh if made correctly and is rolled out and draped over the cake rather than spread. All the fondant recipes Ilana originally found called either for boiling sugar in water for an eternity or for vile ingredients like marshmallows and Crisco. The no-cook recipe we ultimately used was mostly powdered sugar, with a little sugar syrup, butter, vanilla and green tea. It was a little too sweet for my tastes, but the kids dug it. Two other families celebrated with us - Evelyn and her family, Sophia and her family. Karen and Ilana's Dad also joined the fun. Alden was thrilled to host Sophia at his house. They hugged and hugged so hard that they fell onto the ground laughing.

Sophia was really excited to play with Alden's toys and to run around the house. She basically took Alden's hand and lead him all around, upstairs and downstairs, inventing new games along the way. She kind of monopolized him, but Alden didn't seem to mind.Playing with Leggos was one of the favorite birthday games. That and chasing each other around the house screaming. Ilana labored for weeks trying to find just the right party game and thought she'd found the perfect one - an olfactory game with paper flower cut outs and lots of different natural extracts. Alden is really big into smelling spices, lotions and soaps. We do a sort of smell safari at the kitchen table, where we pull down jars of spices for Alden to compare, and he'll do this for hours. The birthday game was a big bust. Alden and Sophia just wanted to keep doing their thing and Evvie was a little too shy to play the game with me, so we abandoned it at the table.Alden got some great gifts this year, including puzzles, toy dinos (he is showing us how they go "roar", much to Sophia's delight), books, arts and crafts, giant fuzzy pipecleaners (so cool!) wooden robots, a table and chair set that's just his size, and a annual membership to the Portland Children's Museum. Hooray!All in all it was a successful birthday party, and hopefully one that will be remembered with fondness for many years to come

On the 18th, we sent him to school with cupcakes, and they sent the kids home early because of snow. This is the 4th year in a row that it's snowed on Alden's actual birthday!