Happy Birthday Oliver!

Oliver turned two years old on February 14th. We had a party for him on the 18th. Our friends Christine and Elcid came over early to help us cook up tons of Filippino/Chinese food. Here we are preparing spring rolls (which as it turns out is super easy and super good!)

While we cooked, the kids all played! We filled Elora and Oliver’s frog tents with balloons, crammed the kids inside and left ’em to it!

Little Charlotte waited until the big kids left so she could enjoy the balloons on her own. Oliver came over to jabber with her.

Then to keep the kids entertained, we did what any good parent would do, and broke out the crossbow! Right away Oliver sat down and tried to load it. There is something cute about pictures of kids loading weapons…

The kids built lego towers and then took turns shooting at the towers. They did a great job on the towers, none of them would fall over – if I ever build a fort, I’m letting these kids handle the construction!

Food was still being prepped – so we got out some cookie dough and let the kids roll out some cookies. It might look like Ollie is putting one on the tray, I think he is actually trying to take it so he can eat the dough…

Fertig! We had spring rolls, chop suey, and rice noodles. It was all super amazing. Thanks to Christine and Elcid (and now we know how to make it ourselves!)

After the kids finished eating, we let them decorate the cookies with frosting, sprinkles and chocolate chips! Then we had to wrap the cookies for the kids to take home so they wouldn’t make themselves sick eating them all before we even had cake and ice cream! Kids from left to right: Elora, Ellie, Zach, Oliver, Benjamin, and Hannah.

Time for cake! Oliver was so happy to see his cake, and especially excited for everyone to sing Happy Birthday to him. He usually spends all day singing on his own, so it was a special treat for him to have a room full of people singing to him!

Oliver blew out his candles all by himself. But he had to blow them out one at a time… Very cute.

Here he is clapping and congratulating himself on a job well done blowing out his candles. I tried out a new chocolate cake recipe for Oliver’s cake, and it turned out really well. Super moist and chocolatey. I think we have a new favorite! The only changes I made to the link above, was a used applesauce instead of oil and added almost a cup of cocoa instead of 3/4 cup. Yum yum.

Om and Sarita were very nice and brought Elora a present so she wouldn’t feel left out. What good friends! Elora loves her new Snow White coloring book (auf Deutsch!)

Ollie has finally figured out that it is exciting to open presents. With every tear of the paper he would say, “ooooohhhh.” This is a nice bucket of wood blocks from Om and Sarita that he liked.

He got some candy from the Mitchell’s and also from Ben, and it was very difficult to convince him to keep opening presents after that. He kept saying, “want open that.” We finally convinced him to open his present from us – here he is saying, “oooooo… ball!” After opening all the presents, Oliver was very sweet and shared all his candy with everyone.

Oliver saying, “twooooooooo!” He says “two” every time he sees this picture!

After the party, Om, Sarita, Christine, and Elcid hung around to go sledding at the park. Here is Sarita taking Ollie down the hill. Sarita said she has only been on a tiny sledding hill, so our big sled hill was pretty fast compared to her previous sledding!

Om has wanted to learn to ski for awhile, so we took Karen’s skis to the park to let him try it out. It took Chris and Elcid holding Om up for him to get in the skis… Funny stuff.

Look at that great snow plow! He fell the first few runs, but then started to get the hang of it. We’ll have to take him to some real mountains now! The downside of skiing at the park is that you have to pop off your skis and walk back up the hill every time… as he walked up the hill the third time Om said, “I feel like an elephant, this is so hard!” It’s great to know people from Nepal, because you just can’t imagine anyone else seriously saying they feel like an elephant!

Elora wanted to bring her skis instead of sledding. That’s our girl!

Elora is really excited to be carried all the way up the hill into the trees so she can ski out of the trees. She is so proud of herself because she can ski all the way down the hill, turn, and stop now.

We came home and enjoyed watching some of the Olympics on the computer before calling it a night. By then Oliver was so tired he actually asked to go to bed. We had a really fun time celebrating Oliver’s birthday! Elora is already making plans for her party next month….