Yesterday my friend Greg (professor from my work), wife Lisa and daughter Miya, arranged a trip to a Bowling alley to celebrate his birthday. We all descended to the lanes to toss some large heavy round things and eventually make it back to their house for some food and drink !.
A few of their friends were also there, some other work colleagues etc and a handful of small children who enjoyed themselves playing with Miya’s toys, including Harry who did very well and stayed up 2hrs past his bedtime !.
See below film of the birthday boy with daughter on lap, doing the candle blowout of a bowling ball cake that Lisa made, she is an amazing cake-maker, which must make all birthday celebrations at their house a joyful culinary experience. It’s one of the few cakes I’ve eaten which tasted as good as it looked !.
Sorry film quality not great – taken with my cell phone.
Each passing day heralds new experiences for our boy, by the way he is known to us as T K (comes from being referred to as ‘that kid’, when either of us are checking in on him), other aliases are variations on that theme such as ‘The Teekman’, ‘Teekster’ etc etc…. I’m sure you all get the twisted idea behind it. We also coined the phrase ‘Cryin all the time’ in reference to the interesting moods that a newborn/toddler can experience. Don’t get us wrong though – he actually is a great kid and has about the same amount of meltdowns as his parents !.
Seeing as this glorious east coast weather is continuing, (hope it reaches Britain soon – yeah right…) I decided that as Barbara is away in New York working for the night I would take advantage of the guy thing and take him down the hill to the Basketball court – oh yes he got into it very quickly, way better than his dad who reaffirmed the past judgment that I am shite at sport except Cricket !.
Aside from dads trauma at not being able to sink or dunk the titanic !. The only other interesting event was Harry’s first haircut courtesy of his father who clippers in hand – yes he did think he was about to be waterboarded !, managed to give him a tasty back and sides, basically in an effort to try and get rid of those wispy curls that my mother had ME endure !. At the time I think it was OK but those horrid photos from years back do still haunt me, validated by my wife’s reaction when she first set eyes on them and had to retreat to the bathroom in order to compose herself !.
Anyway the ordeal was not too bad and as you can see below I managed to get a few locks for family pendents ha ha and also an after photo if you can make it out, although you may be distracted by his cool Tigger sleepsuit the UK relees (family term for relatives) sent us.
Wow, what a lovely days weather we had in Philly today. I decided it was too good to go to work so I figured I would get busy in the garden and get our bikes that we bought last summer set up for the kid and us in readiness for some tree hugging outdoor fun !.
I picked up Harry from daycare, who had decided it would be fun to stage a ‘dirty protest’ in his crib there this afternoon, luckily they had cleaned him up in time for my arrival with bikes attached to car !.
We went on to fairmount park for a trail through the woods.
Oh yes it was a massive success – freedom, exercise and a kid in his element looking cute in his big yellow helmet. What really surprised me was how easy it was to ride with him on the back, I just have to teach him hand-signals next, then we can really hit the mean streets !.
So we thought our son needed a quick fix of animals on a quiet dreary Sunday. We decided to take him to a small town zoo that is close to where we live, Elmwood Park Zoo in Norristown if you are in the least bit interested. It was great as there was noone there because of the rain !.
The zoo is OK….., it didn’t matter really as long as Harry got to see some small and large fluffy things !.
We had a nice time, as you can see he took his first horse ride ever, he did very well and seemed a natural, must have been due to the practise he has had on the rocking horse his granny got him for Xmas !. (Oh yeah the horse is called Chocolate – must have been why he liked him so much !!)
As you can see from the below photo both mommy and H are beat from a hectic wild (life) day;
