On to the new pages! Hot off the…presses….digital bits….whatever catchy phrase you use now a days, I’ve finished Andrew’s birthday pictures. On the day of his actual birthday we made some cupcakes, put two candles in them, and had a little celebration at the house and after dinner he opened gifts from the family. Andrew has caught on to the gift receiving/opening idea much quicker then Alex did. He sees the gifts all wrapped in fancy birthday paper and he knows exactly how to get in there and open them up. I suppose he learned that from his brother.
Last weekend we had a bigger party at the house where we had some friends over for a Bar-B-Q. A couple of days before the party I got the Bar-B-Q out to check it over to make sure it weathered the winter ok. It would be more then a little embarrassing to have people over for hamburgers and sausage and not have a working Bar-B-Q. When I stored it away before the winter it was already in pretty sad shape and the winter months were not kind to it. On one end the burner element had completely disintegrated into rust and when I started it up only two giant flames shot out at weird angles from the burner producing a sound more like a propane torch then a Bar-B-Q. So the day before the party we had to go out and get a new grill and I spent a good portion of the night putting it all together.
Since Andrew is very into Sesame Street at the moment we had a Sesame Street themed party. Jen was her ever creative self and made a fantastic Count von Count birthday cake and she made these super creative Sesame Street characters to hang on the walls. Here’s the pictures for our family celebration and the cook out party.
On the morning of Andrew’s big party Jen had convinced me earlier in the week to sign up for my first race of the year, an Aquathon. It was a two mile run, 400 meter swim, and then a two mile run again. For the last couple of months I’ve actually been running one day a week and swimming two days a week as my exercise so this seem to fit right in with my training. There were only thirty or so people signed up for the race and I managed to place 5th overall. After the first run I was in eighth place, I moved up to fourth in the water, and then only one person managed to pass me on the second run. The deciding factor in doing the race was the fact it was taking a place a couple blocks from the house so Jen, Alex, and Andrew came to cheer me on. Jen took a couple of pictures which I put up here.
