I can't believe he's 5!

It seems unreal to me that sweet Anders is 5. Unreal that he's closing in on kindergarten. How can he be so grown up? He's still my sweet boy, of course, as snuggly as always.

Anders has been eagerly anticipating his birthday for months--we started the countdown shortly after Erik's birthday in mid-November, and picked it up a level after all the Christmas fun. It's interesting to me how he's been working through the concept of age. He's been trying to figure out a way that he can be older than Erik, and insists it's not fair that Erik is always older. He wants to know exactly which of his preschool classmates he's older than, and who is older than him. He's actually on the younger side of his classmates, so he's thrilled that his two best buds are "younger" than him.

Anders loves Star Wars with a passion. One of his best friends at school let him know that he had Star Wars underwear, and ever since then Anders has been campaigning to get some. Of course, they don't sell it in stores anymore, so I had to wait for the right size to come up on ebay. I realized, though, that the child has had mostly hand-me-down underwear, and he still fits into the Wiggles underwear. He let me know he is long done with it, and I did agree that it would be OK to move on.

So, the first present I gave him on his birthday morning was his Star Wars underwear.




He then was ready to open his long-awaited gift from Grandma Barb and Grandpa Rick. He put in his request when browsing on ebay a few months ago, and thankfully Grandma was able to get it--along with a set of just lightsabers, to increase our depleted collection. The small light sabers are lost so frequently in our household.




We then took a birthday breakfast trip to Denny's, possibly Anders' favorite place to eat.


He ate everything we put in front of him: 2 big pancakes, 2 sausage, and 3 pieces of bacon.


When we got home, we had 15 minutes before it was time for school, so he got in a little more Lego time (while wearing his crown, which wasn't really for his birthday, but from the fairytales theme they have been doing in his preschool class, but seemed fitting)


I took the kids to school and then stayed with Anders for the first part of the morning. I played whatever he wanted and then read 5-6 books to him and several of his classmates. Then it was time for morning circle---I brought in a few of his baby clothes, as well as his baby album and the professional photos album that I have. The kids enjoyed looking at pictures of Anders as a baby. I left after circle time.

We had a nice lunch with the lunch buddies, and then there was more time for Legos before picking up Erik and one of Anders' best friends at school (who stays until 3:30 each day) at 2. Carl took them all to Fairyland in Oakland, where they had a lot of fun playing together.

It was a fun day of celebrating a very special 5 year old boy.