Celebrations

We celebrated Silas' Birthday a little different this year. The plan was to have a small immediate family celebration (me, Joe and the kids) on the day of his birthday. Since, ya know, I am still recovering from last years party. I had a friend of a friend make a pirate cake (Silas' request!) and that was going to be our cute, little, family birthday. In my head his bigger celebration was going to be the following Friday when we took him to the Stepping Stone Theater for a musical. Made sense to me.

The morning of his Birthday he woke up and said, "ALL of the people are going to come over and sing to me!!" And then my heart and stomach and everything else in my body sank. I dropped the ball. There is no party and that's all he wants. And it hit me, of course a four year old wants a party. He can't figure out that our celebration will be five days later at a theater. Good grief. So I smiled at him and told him that, yes, we will all be singing really loud for him that night. 

I dropped him off at preschool and immediately made a few phone calls. My dad, Joe's mom and Joe's brother were able to make it to our house that night for the (last minute) party.  

The pirate cake arrived around noon and he requested to look at it for most of the afternoon. He was looking while I was scrounging around for Birthday decorations. I found Silas' cowboy banner from last year's party and put that up. I found a jungle animal spill mat that my mom gave me a few years ago and used it as a fun table cloth. I set out some pirate decorations (toys!) on the table to make it look like there was a theme going on and gathered the balloons from his bedroom and tied them to a chair. 

It worked. He was stoked and I will say it was a heck of a lot less stressful pulling things together last minute than spending weeks making everything Pinterest worthy.  Don't get me wrong, I love me an All-Out party, but this worked great, too!

He got a good amount of pirate accessories that he has been playing with all week. We have had more treasure hunts than I can count :)

Grandpa was pretty into the toys as well!

We also got him a BIKE. Which was another reason I thought I could get away with a teeny party. He loves the bike. We've been outside riding it already, in our icy, snowy driveway. Not ideal, but it works.

We had him close his eyes and told him he couldn't open them until we said so. Joe wheeled the bike out from the laundry room and of course Veda says, "Bicycle!" I didn't even see that one coming. We have the surprise on video, it's really sweet. My bright orange bike riding pirate!

And then last night was the performance. We kept on telling Silas that we were going to take him to a play. He didn't get what a play is. He just heard the word "PLAY" and got excited. 

We dropped Veda off with the grandparents and headed to the theater. We saw Kickin' it Irish, so as you can imagine, it was an hour of Irish dancing. Some humor, lots of costume changes, unique instruments, and very talented kids. When it was over and the lights came on he asked if we could do "another one". We told him it was over and he burst into tears. That's a good sign that he liked it. So there you have it, how we celebrated Silas' fourth year!