Birthday Boy!

Look who's THREE!

Last Tuesday was the big day - Linden officially left behind the terrible twos, and entered the fearsome threes. The day started off with a bang - Juniper skipped school, and the three of us headed down to the Woods Hole Child Center (Linden's preschool) to spend the morning parent (and big sister)-helping/celebrating. (Poor Clark just trudged off to work as usual). Here are a few photos:

Linden (literally) digging himself into a hole.

Ringing the bell(s) to come in

Waiting to blow out candles as everyone sang happy birthday. I brought in grapes and homemade cookies for the communal snack, meaning we had to be creative about where to stick the candles!

 I figured that the morning at the Child Center fully qualified as a kid birthday celebration, so in the evening we invited a couple of grown-ups (albeit super fun, energetic grown-ups) for dinner, cake and presents. I am still patting myself on the back for that decision :)

Ben and Liz have a captive audience before supper

I bring out the cake: a traditional "3", but with a few added touches

Dump truck special delivery: dirt (graham crumbs), and worms (gummy, of course)

It is SO EXCITING when it is your birthday!

Linden got four presents, all of which were a huge hit. Train tracks and trains; a superhero outfit (both pictured above), "Dinosaurs Zoom" (a book about dinosaurs and trucks and birthday presents - ummm... is there anything better?), and....

... this. Need I elaborate? "real digging" is clearly Linden's new favourite activity.

Other than all the birthday festivities, we have been up to some other fun fall stuff.  For instance, Juniper went to the birthday party to end all birthday parties - her friend Idahlia turned 6, and held the party at a FARM.  Seriously. They got to hang out with tonnes of animals, and all the kids (the ones who were old enough, anyway), got to go on a trail ride!

Feeding hay to the most adorable pony I've ever seen

Off they go!

We also made a return trip to Beebe woods this weekend - we couldn't resist after the glorious hike a week ago.  We had an even larger group this time around, and the kids had a BLAST. We did too!

"Brushing" the pond with a pine bough

Swinging out over the water!  We want to go back in the summer and actually swing out into the pond.  It looked like so much fun that I had to have a go at it as well, but it took me a good few minutes to screw my courage to the sticking point before I did it!

Stopping for a bit of a snack

Running to catch up with everyone! (we were waylaid by the swinging expedition)

The more dangerous boulders to climb, the better

Look what we found at the top of the pine tree stand!  This teepee made an already magical spot even better. We hung out here for a very long time.

Polka-dotted feather! Anyone know what bird this is from?  A jay, maybe?

The magical spot from a different view

 We also went to a super fun pumpkin-carving party at Juniper's new friend Elise's house (they ride the bus together every day).  Both Linden and Juniper drew their own face designs onto their pumpkins, and Clark happily helped them carve ("happily" in part because he enjoys such endeavours, but perhaps even more so because he gets to harvest the seeds and roast them). I actually have no pictures from the party itself, but here are the after-effects:

Juniper's pumpkin (left) and Linden's (right)

And finally, because I just couldn't resist - we went to another very fun birthday party yesterday (Juniper's friend Maddie turned 5), and while I did not manage to get many pictures from the party itself, I did find this pretty spectacular mushroom on the edge of the driveway.  I'm allowed to sneak in mushrooms if I have offered up a huge amount of other kid-related photos first, right?

See you next week!

Seriously - how cool is this? I thought it was a very lost sea urchin at first :)