Bryce's birthday party

Last night we had a few friends over to celebrate Bryce's birthday. Of course, we missed all of our family and would have loved for all of them to be able to join us. Kelly started preparing the main entree on Friday night: twenty pounds of pork shoulder on the smoker.



18 hours later, we had some delicious North Carolina pulled pork.



Bryce loves balloons when he sees them at grocery stores so I had to go pick him up some balloons.











Which of course meant that we had to divide them up and let Cason play with half of them.



I love these next two pictures. I can't remember what Bryce was crying about but at least it wasn't Cason being mean to him.



Love their tree frog shirts? My aunt Lou Ann got Bryce's outfit for him right around the time he was born. Lou Ann -- I bet you didn't know that is my all time favorite outfit for him. I even checked Osh Kosh and ebay to see if they had the same outfit in bigger sizes (so he can wear it in future summers) but no luck. I got Cason's frog shirt on ebay.



A few candid shots just to prove we had friends over.





Poor Josiah and Cason were just dying for some frog cake!



I gave Bryce one of the frog's eyes. He had been crawling around the house playing with the fork when I went to put him in his highchair. I love the look he gives the eye.



Alissa -- check out how much frosting I had to use to build up the "snout" of the frog!





He didn't really eat this much, he threw a huge chunk down on the floor for Kielers.



After a (much hated and quick) bath, we had Cason help Bryce open presents.



Chris, Lacy, Josiah, and Luke got Bryce a super cute animal book because he loves animals and some awesome red eyed tree frog dishes from Rainforest Cafe. After this picture he pretty much wandered off. Cason opened a few more presents but Bryce was nowhere near so I didn't get more pictures.



Thanks to all of our friends for helping us to celebrate Bryce's big day!

Ribbit

I just finished Bryce's red eyed tree frog cake this afternoon. Months ago, I searched the internet for a red eyed tree frog cake to copy but I could not find any I liked. I found one that was cute but looked pretty hard. I did not want a regular old frog, it had to specifically be a red eyed tree frog. I was looking at a picture of a red eyed tree frog and realized that their heads are shaped roughly like a football. So I bought a football shaped cake pan and used jumbo cupcakes for the eyes. It came out basically exactly as I had it pictured in my head so I am happy with it.



Ignore the messy paper underneath/around the cake. I tried to photoshop it out but apparently I have no clue how to do that.



I had some leftover cupcakes so I just threw together some extra eyes.

Pancakes

This whole story starts off with Cason hating eggs. He ate them briefly when he was maybe 18 months old but then he started to flat out refuse them. It became a joke, when we asked him what he wanted to eat, sometimes we'd tease him and tell him we were making eggs. As I was searching Amazon for an egg ring for Kelly, I saw some silicone star and heart egg/pancake molds. They got good reviews so I decided to get them to try to entice Cason to eat a star shaped egg. It totally worked. He now loves star eggs with cheese on them.

So last time Kelly made his protein pancakes, he made several stars and Cason loved those too. Last week, I was thumbing through a magazine and some some a flower shaped pancake mold. So I decided to check online and see if there were more fun shapes out there. I found that Williams-Sonoma had some really fun shapes that also got great reviews. We decided to head there yesterday and get some for Cason.

When we got there, they had two sets. One had a sun, moon, and Saturn. The other had a pig, cow, and chicken. We let Cason choose and he choose the farm animals. He was very excited to make up pancakes with Daddy after his nap.



The only thing I don't like about the Williams-Sonoma ones is that they are huge. I wish they were about half this size.



We have made up quite a few different varieties over the months: apple cinnamon, raisin, pumpkin, chocolate chip (with barley malted chocolate chips), blueberry, and banana chocolate chip. We usually let Cason pick which variety he would like. This time he chose blueberry.





The saleslady also talked us into this Pancake Pen. It surprisingly works awesome! It lets you fill the molds with no mess and you can also free form pancakes. Kelly tried to spell out Cason's name but he was running out of batter so they didn't turn out well.



Cason was so excited to try a pig pancake. We let him eat one as soon as they cooled.



And another for breakfast this morning.

Picking out Bryce's present

One of my New Year's resolutions is to teach Cason that it's fun to give to/help others. I thought that maybe I could use Bryce's birthday to show him that it's fun to give gifts to others. I talked up the idea to him for a few days and then yesterday we set out to the bookstore. We told him that he had to pick out a book for Bryce. We wanted to give him free reign to choose but he kept picking books that we knew he would like so we had to give him some direction. He was convinced that Bryce would like this Thomas the Train book but it had a lot of words so we kept pointing out other books we thought were more age appropriate. Overall, I think he had fun choosing.





This Curious George book is one of many that he said was the book he was going to get. He kept changing his mind.



As a side note, yes he does like to wear his sunglasses indoors. He wore them all morning today at MOPS and his teacher said he even went to the bathroom with them on.

And the lucky winner is...



A book about trucks!



This morning he "helped" wrap up the book.

Cake smash

Click on the picture to make it bigger.

Oatmeal

Rycie today

Not every little boy is lucky enough to share his room with a dog crate. It's a huge attraction to Bryce and he loves dropping his pacifiers and toys in the top and then leaning in the doorway to retrieve them. Today he pulled Kielers' dog bed out after dropping his screwdriver in there 628 times and crawled in.