Birthday Party

Yikealo's birthday is at the end of this week, but we celebrated with David's family last Saturday. A certain little boy was VERY excited about it all - he's been quite envious of all of his cousins who have had birthdays during the last year, and he's asked over and over, "When is MY birthday?" Thanks to James and Susan for hosting all 24 of us for a very loud, fun evening - just a little pre-cursor to our family vacation later this summer!

We were supposed to do appetizers for everyone, and as part of that, we treated the family to a taste of Ethiopia. My Mom was visiting for a few days, and we took her to Cleveland's Ethiopian restaurant on Friday evening. Mr. Y had not wanted to go - when we told him that we were going to eat injera and shiro, he said, "AGAIN??" and pouted (we haven't had it since February). As soon as we were served, however, he LOVED it - he couldn't stop eating, even though he was getting quite full. At one point, he was holding his stomach, and he asked me to loosen his adjustable waist jeans, but then he dug into the food again. I tried to caution him, "Yikealo, if you're getting too full, don't eat anymore. You don't need to finish this, okay? You don't want to get sick." He gave me one of those "You-are-so-silly-Mom" looks and said, "If somebody is getting full, they just need their mom to make their pants not too tight and they can eat more." Hmmmm.....makes me wonder if there was some psychological thing going on with memories of hunger, because we often have to argue with him to get him to eat more than about 3 bites.

At any rate, we bought some extra shiro and injera for David's family to try at the party and ALMOST everyone tried it!

Yikealo soaked up all of the attention as usual. There were presents, a pinata, a cake and lots of ice cream, and ultimately, a very happy little boy.

He fell in love with these goggles for some reason, and spent quite a bit of the evening riding a tricycle around the basement while wearing them...attractive, isn't he? He said that he was "the bad guy."

Check out this ornery kid! Is it any wonder that Quinn and Yikealo are such good buddies?

The younger boys all received matching shirts for our trip to the beach later this summer.

The kids all had a marvelous time with the pinata - just what they all need, more sugar!

I was very busy last week with the Nursing Home silent auction, so David handled the party planning and the cake. He did a great job, and I don't think that I have ever seen a Dad so excited about a little boy's birthday...

I wish that I had gotten a good photo of Yikealo's face while we were all singing "Happy Birthday" to him - he was just glowing!

After the candles were blown out, the two little boys had a great time dipping the candles into the cake and licking off the frosting. The germ-a-phobes among you can pretend that you didn't see that part!

As a special note to Aunt Susan and Aunt Julie, the boy has been spending as much time as possible this week riding his bike while wearing his new Spiderman "hollmet" and squeaking his horrid bicycle horn. He generally has his new pop-gun wrapped around the handlebars, and has to make frequent stops to "shoot" our next-door teenage neighbor boy, Heath. Heath, being a great kid, plays along and pretends to fall down dead, which of course encourages "the bad guy" to continue...