I am posting pictures of Dallin's birthday which was almost 3 weeks ago, and tomorrow I will post Adriana's birthday which was a week ago. I may get back into blogging more often now that we finally have had an offer accepted on a house. This was the third house that we officially made an offer on and there was one other that we wanted to make an offer on but someone else wanted to pay more for it than we did.
The pictures ended up in reverse order, see I am forgetting all my blogging tricks like that you have to load them in reverse order so they come out in the right order.
This year we got him a lot of presents that I have been wanting to get him for a while. Our lack of boy toys was really starting to hit me when I see him putting My Little Ponies down for naps and feeding them with toy dishes and food and carrying around babydolls in their carseats (why does little miss spellchecker think that babydoll and carseat are not legitimate compound words? In my world they are, so I am leaving them!) and telling me "baby nap!" In other words "Quiet, my baby is sleeping." The best masculine spin I could put on it was, "You are such a good daddy!" Anyway, he needed some tools. When he got all decked out he boasted, "Bob Builder!"In other words, "Look at me, I am Bob the Builder!" Who needs the word "the" anyway, his dad certainly doesn't.
This was the first time that we had an early morning family party. I had a lot planned for the day and woke up at like 6 and couldn't get back to sleep, neither could Ariel so we went downstairs to make the cupcakes. By the time they were ready everyone was up. Dallin and I were the only ones out of our pajamas.
I am taking advantage of little kids not knowing how bad they got it, like using Christmas wrapping paper for his birthday instead of running out in the middle of the night to get birthday paper after having realized that my seemingly endless supply of pre-used gift bags contained none that weren't pink or floral. At least the Christmas paper was just striped, masculine enough, right?
It took Dallin a while to blow out his candles, which was fine because it gave us the chance to get a lot of blowing out the candles-shots. I was encouraging him in this one. I decided to post it because not only is he cute trying to blow out the candles, I liked how my profile reminded me of so many of my siblings, first my nose and forehead of Jacob, then the eye sockets of Rebekah and mouth of Maegan, even the newly grown tight curls next to my temples reminded me of Adam.
This was actually supposed to be the first picture. He had picked out the Diego candle way back when we were shopping for cake decorations for Ariel's birthday. Don't you just love that he is actually looking at the camera?
He is getting to be such a big boy now but when I say things like, "You are a handsome dude," he insists that he is a baby. Yesterday he was showing me how he can put lids on water bottles and I told him that he is a big boy, he said, "No, baby." Then I explained that babies can't put lids on water bottles, he said, "Oh," like it was all coming together for him then, "big boy?" Like could I really be a big boy now? He loves keys and locking and unlocking doors one of his first words was lock. He would say it about any door or key hole. He is so cuddly, he could cuddle and hug and kiss me all day if I let him. I really have to tell him that it is enough kisses, he especially takes advantage of sitting on my lap at church, where I am at his mercy to keep him quiet. He loves his sisters too, maybe a little too much. He is a big helper, like bringing people things that they are talking about even if they didn't ask him for them specifically. He loves his dad and always runs to greet him when he comes home from work. He is also a jokester like taking people's shoes and waiting for them to notice with a smirk on his face when we are getting ready to leave. Ariel picked up some slang at school, she says, "Hey peeps!" Which I think means, "Hello people" and Dallin consequently picked it up from her and likes to tease me by saying, "Mama peep!" Which means "Mama is a peep." To which I respond, "Dallin is a peep!" and it goes and and forth and he giggles the whole time.
We were watching a nature show about crocodiles and Adriana built this croc out of blocks.
First Adriana wanted to have a butterfly birthday party, but she wanted to invite a few boys, so we decided to have a bug party. This is supposed to be a caterpillar made out of cupcakes.
We had the pinata inside and here is a shot of Nikolay dangling it from a broomstick because we had no place to hang it from. 
Adriana was the only one who requested a pinata this year, but I made it a little too strong and the kids couldn't bust it open, we had one of the dads eventually whack it.
Another early morning present opening ceremony. It was so hard to shop for Adriana this year because she didn't really want anything, so I just had to really pay attention to what she liked and was interested in and the cool thing is that she was genuinely surprised with her gifts.
