"Happy . . . to you!"

Two weeks ago we celebrated G's second birthday.  To get her ready for the big day, there were many things that we needed to cover.  First, we needed to teach her how to tell people how old she is when asked.  After lots of practice she can now hold up her pointer finger and thumb and tell you, "I'm twooooo!"  She thinks it is so cool when she lets you know her age.

Second, Becca needed to take on a project that would let G know how important her birthday is.  As an aside, you should know that when Becca tackles a big project, she really throws herself into it.  So, in January the brainstorming began.  G really likes trains and has been expert at spotting them, mimicking them and imagining them.  So the idea of a train party was hatched and Becca began scouring the web for train cakes, train plates, train napkins, wooden trains, plastic trains and rubber trains.  She, luckily, was able to find all of the above and now only had to throw it all together.

Finding everything proved to be the easy part.  Now we (I say we, but I really mean just Becca) just had to figure out how to pull off the train cake.  After three days and nights of baking, experimenting with different cake recipes and frostings, she hit a home run and produced the piece of artwork that you see below.  This was a big relief to Becca as she had put so much time into it and felt extra pressure since G knew she was getting a train cake for her birthday.

Now that we had the cake, we needed a forum to present the cake.  So we reserved a kid park in town and invited Genevieve's favorite playmates.  The only downside of having a party was that it meant that much more waiting to eat the cake.  More than a few tears were shed when she realized that she had to eat dinner before she could dig into the cake.  She had lots of fun playing with her friends, stealing m&m's off of the yellow car and being the center of everyone's attention.  It was a riot to see her react to our rendition of "Happy Birthday".  She was giggling and clapping that everyone would sing a song just for her.  She was ecstatic to finally dig into that cake!

With the party successfully behind us, we still had two days of celebrating to go until her actual B-Day.  We spread out the process of opening gifts and eating the leftover train cake over the next few days.  That may make her sound a little spoiled with so many gifts, but it really was more the result of her wanting to play with each gift immediately upon opening it.  With a new toy in hand, who really cares about the other stuff hidden under colorful paper?

G scored some nice loot for her big day.  Here you can see her playing with her first bike, a sweet old school trike, and a wooden train set that she loves to play with daily.

After the big weekend, on her actual birthday she continued to live it up by playing with some cool train stickers and her first Play-Doh set and eating, yet, more train cake (which she loved!).  The best thing of all is that after a few days of hearing "Happy Birthday" being sung to her she now breaks into song every time she sees or wants cake as well as when she see a big group of people gathered together.  Birthday is a tough word, so she conveniently skips over that part and it comes out, "Happy...to you!"  It is so cute!

Thanks to everyone for making Genevieve's second birthday such a great occasion. I'm sure she is looking forward to number three already.  At this rate we might have to rent the White House by the time we are celebrating number eight.