Happy Birthday Bitty!

Where does the time go?

Six years ago we welcomed our precious Baby Bitty into the world. I wrote this in my journal when he was about a week and a half old:

"Last night I was holding Bitty and just gazing into his beautiful eyes... I'm so grateful for Bitty and I love him so much, I can't imagine not having him with us."

Little Bitty's arrival also meant a new role for Cuddlebug and Bearhug as big brothers. Another journal excerpt from shortly after Bitty was born:

"Cuddlebug and Bearhug are excited about their new baby brother, who they each refer to as "my baby." They've also learned how to spell his name (they recently learned to spell their own and each other's names).

They've been incredibly helpful and love to do things for their little brother, although they are less than impressed with his diapers. Bearhug described Bitty's poopy diapers as "grossy-gross." Now that he is real to them they've become much more curious also. The day after we came home from the hospital, Cuddlebug told me my tummy was small and asked me "the baby's not in your tummy anymore?" When I confirmed that he's out of my tummy now, he asked "where's the door?" and proceeded to lift my shirt and look for a "door." It makes sense, he had to get out of there somehow ;).

Bitty enjoys being with his older brothers also, when he is awake he likes to watch them play and he loves when they talk to him. He can sleep through anything so their continual noise level doesn't bother him. Probably because he's been sleeping through it for months already."

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Little Bitty - I love you so much and am so blessed to be your Mama! Your beautiful smile and your sweet giggling laughter warm my heart. As you get older and interact more with people outside of our family, I see that people are drawn to you and I love how you bring joy to others just by being you. Happy birthday, angel. I love you!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

I'm about a month late in getting these posted, but here are some pictures from Bitty's birthday celebration. Since he had school that day, we sent in some Thomas cupcakes for the class (I didn't get a picture of those, sorry). He didn't seem interested in having a party with friends, so we celebrated as a family after school.

Actually the celebration started the Saturday before his birthday, when we picked up his main present:



Honestly, with three train-obsessed boys I'm really not sure how we managed to go this long without getting a train table. I guess because we didn't have room before but we've recently cleared out some space. Needless to say, Bitty LOVED it and was so excited to play with it. His brothers had fun with it also :).

So back to the actual day of his birthday... Here he is reading his birthday card from Grandma. He had a few left-over cupcakes that he brought home, which is the source of the frosting on his face there :).



We took the family to Chuck E. Cheese for dinner and fun.







His birthday cake was waiting for us at home. It's not the first Thomas cake he's had, and may not be the last either ;).




Happy birthday, baby!!

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And they laughed

Yesterday when I got home from work, dh and the boys were all outside. I went inside to change clothes intending to go back outside with the family, but I had barely gotten upstairs when a screaming Bitty came running inside looking for me.

"You got WET on it AAAHHHHHHH I don' wanna be WEEETTTT!!! And (Cuddlebug and Bearhug) iss shooting WET and you pants is being WET AAAHHHHH don't get WET on my red shirt and der WAFFING!!!! STOP WAFFING brudders!!!!"

He went on and on... apparently his brothers had gotten a hold of the water hose and sprayed him with it. And then laughed. Bitty was gritting his teeth and removing the offensive wet items as he told me what had happened. The indignant anger was palpable.

Of course my first reaction was to try to calm him down. I mean he was UPSET. He hates to be wet (bathtime has become a battleground again but that's another post). He especially hates to have his clothes wet.

My second reaction was that this is the first time I can ever remember him noticing that someone was laughing and being upset about it. Normally he'd be upset about the "wet" but oblivious about the laughing. That's a big leap in social awareness IMO. And I was impressed that he was able to tell me exactly what happened, and in pretty-darn-near complete sentences too. Go Bitty!

And then my heart stopped.

My sweet baby is no longer oblivious to things like someone laughing when he's upset. Not that it happens often (thank goodness) but being aware of it and knowing how to handle it are two different things :(.

I wonder if this came about because of what happened at school last week, in which he was the one laughing. He was apparently calling his friends names* at school (and if his response when we tried to talk to him about it at home was any indication, he thought he was HILARIOUS but clearly his friends did not). So maybe going through that experience and having to apologize for it is what taught him that laughing at someone is not nice. And therefore having someone laugh at him is unacceptable (as it should be).

When Bearhug and Cuddlebug came in, Bitty started chewing them out for both the "wet" and the "waffing." Maybe I shouldn't be so worried about him after all, he knows how to stick up for himself. He told his big brothers EXACTLY what he thought about the situation. I intervened before he could start another incident (because he gets physical when he's angry and they were grumpy about something else and not exactly in a mood to tolerate being chewed out by little brother), had them apologize and convinced him to let it go.

Peace restored. Whew.



* My best guess is that maybe since he gives our cat a new name every couple of weeks, he thought he could make up a new name for his friends too? He thinks he's funny stuff whenever he renames the cat, so it kind of seems like maybe that's what he was doing at school, but it's hard to know for sure.

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Puppy face

Took Little Bitty to a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese on Saturday, and one of his favorite things to do there is to make pictures of himself. Well, sort of. He mostly likes to make pictures of the Thomas trains on his shirt (because of course he is always wearing a Thomas shirt when he's not in school). We have a ton of pictures that look like this:



So I was surprised when after a few of those, he brought me this one:



Sooo precious! When I told him I loved it, he said, "puppy!"

?

He ran off to play without elaborating, but later when he saw me looking at it, he volunteered more details:

"Iss juss wike da Baby-Einstein-Neighba'hoo-A'mals puppy!"

Ha! He's right. :) That's a pretty good impression of the puppy on the Baby Einstein Neighborhood Animals DVD:




(Yeah, he's totally obsessed with all things Baby Einstein at the moment.)

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A new look...

So I've been working on a new blog template forever (on and off) and it is finally done, yay!! In the process I learned just enough about html and css to be DANGEROUS, lol ;).

If you've been keeping up in a reader, stop by and check it out :).

I've cleaned up the links and tried to organize things so that if you happen to be looking for something other than my latest post it will hopefully be easy to find.

Feedback / suggestions welcome as always :).

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Magic Marker Monday: Duck

Spring break is over and it's back to reality today... I have tons to catch up on but first I've been wanting to post this for a while.


An adorable ceramic duck, which Cuddlebug made at school and gave to me for my birthday. He did an awesome job on it! It's actually two parts, the duck and a little pond for him to sit in.

I took it to work and have it sitting on my bookshelf there :).

(I guess this shows how behind I am, since this is from January).


For more Magic Marker Monday, visit 5 Minutes for Special Needs.




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