nine is divine!

it’s a magical number. 3 is the magic number, and 9 is the magic number squared! there is so much to love  about the number nine and we’ll just try to remain in denial about nine being halfway to eighteen. (gasp!)

nine voyages around the sun for this birthday boy… and just in case you don’t have time to click on those other 8 birthday posts for a long, winding walk down memory lane, i will share a ridiculously cute quinn quote from age 3, the magic number:

“i know a baby. it was me. he was born all day, but then he was not born anymore. he was three. and he had balloons and a red party hat on.”

the post for his third birthday didn’t actually exist until today, when i realized it was the only birthday the blog was missing. there was a gap in time between my original baby posts from myspace and the time when i began blogging here, and although i had transferred over the myspace posts years ago, i intended (and still intend) to fill in the gaps. i have all the photos and many great quotes and stories from those years tucked in bff emails, so i am going to get back to mining those old archives and filling in the missing year or so of posts. because, balloons and a red party hat, and many other treasures to unearth.

but back to nine. this is about all i got to see of him on his actual birthday, last tuesday. one of the side effects of being a child of two households is you get to observe your birthday the weekend before and/or after your actual birthday, though i suppose it’s true for all kids when their birthday falls on a weekday, which is most of the kids on most of their birthdays. on the plus side, he gets multiple days of celebrating, on the minus side, he doesn’t get to spend time with the actual person who carried him around in her womb for 10 months. except for when she brings root beer floats and sugar cookies to school for your whole classroom to share (he had seen packages of sugar cookies at some point during a trip to the grocery store while we were in new york, and logged it away in his memory, hence the very specific request) .

when he got home on friday evening, finally, i fed him rainbow tortellini for dinner. during his previous week with me, he had read aloud from calvin and hobbes about tor-tell-ini (and how much calvin despises it) and after 7 mentions of the word, i let him know that i thought he would actually like tor-tell-ini, explained what it is, and also informed him of how most people like to pronounce it.

he came home very excited about his dad’s present for him of a drum set! he has already started taking beginning drum lessons on youtube, and here is how he explains what he has learned so far:

that night he got to open his birthday present.

saturday morning, he spent building his computer and i went off to farmer’s market to pick up eggs and coffee beans and spinach by my little self while the men stayed home. i came home and frosted the cupcakes (with orders for 3 colors of frosting, of course; his desires are inversely proportional to my effort to maintain simplicity).

we drove around and borrowed the oldest boys from each of our two six-child family friends for the afternoon. quinn was proud to show them his freshly built computer, and they set to work on the game together (minecraft, but with specific wiring missions required to follow the storyline. every so often i’d hear, “go forward!” “well, you’re the one holding the red wires, you do it!”)

these two are my favorite pictures of the day, which feel like they somehow foreshadow the bottomless pits of hunger they will be in a few years as teenagers. their appreciation of the food i provided was so heart-warming.

grazing the veggies, orange slices, and chips and guacamole while quinn arranged his pizza toppings.

after they “decorated” their own pizzas, as quinn likes to say, we let them bake while they got a game of pokemon monopoly underway. from the kitchen i could hear him directing, “okay! 5 1’s, 5 5’s, 5 10’s, 6 20’s…”

i was only able to lure them away from playing by offering food. as they played, i kept hearing “all in favor of (fill in the blank), say i!” and then three voices chorusing, “i!” i know that 3 is not always the magic number when it comes to friend playdates, but in this case, they were peas in a pod. when i called up to say, “all in favor of root beer floats, say i”, there was a similar unanimous vote. after i brought it up, i remembered that friend l had already announced that he was fasting sugar during lent, and that he was only taking breaks from it on sunday (i admired his integrity in saying so, when his camp boss mama wasn’t there to enforce, and told him i would send cupcakes home with him for the next day. he didn’t seem to equate root beer floats with sugar, though, and i wasn’t going to remind him after i had accidentally waved them in front of him. he was so gracious about how much he was enjoying his, that i imagine his heavenly father would have looked favorably and overlooked his oversight anyway.

we had a good cross-cultural discussion about lent (which friend c hadn’t heard of, but friend l was currently observing) but friend c was familiar with mardi gras and easter. it reminded me of ols conversations around holiday times that went something along the lines of, “some people celebrate this way… others do that…” and enjoying our diversity in an inclusive environment.

the boys worked together to place the lego candles, but i had to then borrow a ninth candle from my housemate, having not realized in time that the package only contained eight. party foul! for the cupcakes i followed catherine newman’s recipe entitled “yay it’s wednesday cake! cake” which were tasty and easy to throw together, since i had just read the post and hadn’t bothered to close the tab yet. her chocolate frosting will have to wait for my birthday.

alright, i know i said those other two pictures were my favorite, but this one is, too. quinn laughing while his two buddies duel their chips for the last few bites of guacamole in the bowl. as story jars go, this one is full of frosting, sprinkles, laughter, guacamole, and friendship. a delicious birthday feast!