Little Man's Big Day

I'm Number ONE, BABY!!!!

Saturday, we had Marshall's first birthday party at Gymboree with all of his under-two friends.
Everyone had a great time, except for one mishap that I'll get into later...

Jamie giving Marshall a birthday hug!

Ms. Molly had as much fun as the kids!Pretty good group shots considering there are 10 kids under 2 and one 5 year-old!
OK, so here's the one bad part of the party...
You can tell two things by looking at the next picture:
1) Marshall is crying
2) I am moving his cupcake away from him.

Why, you ask?

Well, the lady who was in charge of the party decided to light Marshall's cupcake, set it in front of him, then turned to walk away - BEFORE Paul and I were even next to him.

Marshall is into pointing at and touching things so of course he stuck his finger right in the flame.

Everyone had already started singing "Happy Birthday" so Marshall just wailed through the entire song. Luckily he's a very slobbery baby so his fingers were wet enough that he didn't have a mark on his poor little finger.
That look of "Mommy, how could you let this happen?" just breaks my heart!I love this picture of Paul that Ms. Molly captured!
Little man quickly rallied, pulled himself together and then demolished his cupcake!
Ms. Robin cracking Marshall up:
All the kiddos attacking PaulYep, that's a bruise on his cheek; the week before his party he did a header into our footstool.
Molly helped Marshall open his presents when we got home.
Molly liked Marshall's gifts A LOT and kept making comments like, "Can Marshall share this with me?" or "This is just what I've always wanted!"Marshall is LOVING cars and trucks right now. He makes an engine noise whenever he plays with them, which is actually a very loud and juicy raspberry... he goes through a lot of shirts and bibs during playtime!Little man all tuckered out after opening gifts.
He's obsessed with this little couch that Ms. Robin lent us!

Big Happenings in the Life of a 5 Year Old

When we were packing for our trip to visit the Clawsons, I told Molly to run upstairs and grab her tooth holder. Her tooth had become REALLY lose and I wanted to make sure we had everything we needed in case the tooth fairy was called into action while we were out of town.

The minute Molly and Evan saw each other Friday morning, Molly made sure to tell him that her tooth was loose and that he could wiggle it if he wanted to... and being a boy, he took her up on that offer. Several times a day Evan would ask if he could wiggle Molly's tooth. We started joking around and saying that Evan should be the one to pull it out...

Sunday morning while packing our stuff, Molly came running upstairs laughing maniacally saying that Evan tried to pull her tooth out and that it was now REALLY loose! Of course my first thought was to grab the camera, so we both ran downstairs to the kitchen where I grabbed my camera just in time to capture this face immediately after she pulled out her tooth... The first thing she asked was if her tooth was broken because when she looked at it, it was jagged at the bottom, not smooth and rounded like you always see in cartoon drawings of teeth. After getting over that momentary uneasiness, Molly was ecstatic and Evan was in awe!

Evan even wanted to hold the tooth himselfAfter Molly cleaned her tooth we tucked it away in her tooth box for safe-keeping. Catching a High-Five from Ms. Leslie!

While we were out of town, our sweet neighbor Robin was checking on Murphy for us. Saturday she called to tell us the a/c was out and that it was 95 degrees in the house... naturally we opted to stay in a hotel Sunday night instead of roughing it at home! Molly was very nervous that the tooth fairy would not know where to find her, but I convinced her there was a tracking device in her tooth box that would lead the tooth fairy straight to our hotel room.

Unfortunately, I do not have pictures of Molly opening her tooth box because she came into our room around 5:30am crying because she didn't think the tooth fairy had come... of course Paul couldn't just tell her to open the box and look, so he had to play along... he got up with her and acted surprised when they checked the box. Needless to say by the time we all got up 2 hours later, it didn't occur to me to take a picture of Molly and her $2 bill from the tooth fairy. My grandma always sent $2 bills for birthdays, Christmas, etc. so I think that's a pretty cool pay-out for a tooth!