Happy Birthday Hank

"I'M 2!" Hank's response when you ask how old he is now (he also holds up 3 fingers everytime).  Birthdays are always bittersweet for me, I love celebrating the day, but I always get tears in my eyes thinking about how old my baby is getting.  Don't let Hank know that I call him my baby though cause according to him "I"m not baby mama, I big boy!".  We're doing lots of "big boy" talking around here in preparation for his sister's arrival.  We had a family party on his actual birthday (Wednesday) with cake and his favorite dinner, tacos.  He got to open his presents from us, his biggest was a play kitchen.  The highlight was our trip over to the zoo to ride the train.  I'm not sure what it is about little boys and trains, but the obsession is intense!  Every morning the first thing he asks me is "I ride choo choo in the tunnel at the zoo?" Since his birthday, I think we've been on the train 4 or 5 times.  It doesn't help that you can hear the train whistle from our house, resulting in a constant reminder of it's presence.  

We had a party at the playground for Hank on Saturday, and it was a beautiful fall morning.  A perfect location for a 2 year old's party.  We had a Curious George theme (another obsession), with cupcakes and goldfish snacks at 11 am!  

So at 2 years of age: Hank is weighing in at 31 lbs 90th percentile and is 36.5 inches tall keeping him at the 98th percentile.  He is currently the same size as an average 3 year old.  At age 2 they "predict" their adult height based on their growth curve over the past 2 years...according to the experts Hank will end up at 6 feet tall.  Now this would make perfect sense since his dad is 6 ft exactly, and I'm clearly no giant.  However, when we compare Hank's growth charts to ours we find that Johnny wasn't the same height/weight until he was 4 years old and he ended up at 6ft, and I was exactly the same size percentiles at age 2, and I came in at a whopping 5 ft. 3 in.  So much for those "expert predictions". 

Happy Halloween

I'm starting to realize that the week of Halloween will always be crazy in our house.  We have all our halloween festivities, and then 2 days later it's Hank's birthday.  It's felt like a whirlwind, but of course full of only fun things!  This year, Hank was old enough to really get excited about pumpkins, costumes, and candy.  After much debate (he insisted that he had to be Jessie from Toy Story, but dad put the kibosh on him dressing as a girl)  I really wasn't opposed, and thought it would always be a funny story; nonetheless we decided on a garden gnome.  Hank and I both have an affinity for gnomes, I have a collection of about 10 throughout the yard and Hank loves to go around and collect them, hug them, tell them he loves them etc.  I find my gnomes in the funniest places these days.  

Our neighborhood does a great Halloween parade and festival for the kids which we participated in with some playgroup friends.  Hank thoroughly enjoyed pumpkin carving; although he wouldn't touch the insides of the pumpkin telling me "that's gross mom".  We took him trick or treating, and introduced him to the world of candy-he ran into the house immediately dumped his bucket of loot and started asking "whats this, mom?"  I'd explain "a tootsie roll" or "dots" and now I'm constantly being pulled to the candy bucket with whines of "Hankey need tootsie roll". I try to explain that no one actually needs a tootsie roll; but this is lost on him.   He helped pass out candy to the trick or  treaters at our house, and enjoyed saying "happy halloween!" to everyone.  We always have a huge turnout at our house, and Johnny likes to keep a tally-this year we ran out of candy just shy of 300 kids, and had to turn away at least another 50.  It was a great Halloween season in our house-and just think, next year we'll have a 3 year old and a 7 month old!