“Yeah, he’s mine!”

“He’s a good dancer!”

“I’ve never seen this side of him before. But it’s pretty awesome, huh?”

*****

Simon rocked our world Saturday night at a wedding reception we went to. He’s been holding out on us. We didn’t know he liked to dance. Or maybe he didn’t know, either. I don’t know where he learned these brake dancing moves, but he was not shy about showing them off. And teaching them to his brother. Micah and I could only stand and stare in awe (and pull out our phones to record it for posterity). We have to take into account, however, that he was totally pumped up on wedding cake, that it was 2 hours past his bedtime, and that he’d also been to a super-fun birthday party earlier in the day. The kid was unstoppable.

And for most of the way home he couldn’t stop talking about how much he likes to dance, and how fun it was to meet a new friend, and what a shame it was that we don’t know her name or her phone number or her address or who her parents are, but how he was really happy to make a new friend and how he really wants to go to more dance parties.

Count me in, Dude. I’m game.

*Okay, I’m trying to embed the video, but failing. So here’s a link to it instead: Bustin’ a move. (Okay, so maybe it did work? But now you have a link and an embedded video. Lucky you.)

We also let the boys stay up way too late two nights in a row, “let” Simon walk 7 miles over two days (we covered about 15 miles ourselves, some running, some walking), and generally made sure we’d be thoroughly incapacitated for the rainy days that are forecasted for this week. But it was warm and sunny this weekend and we soaked in every possible second of it.

No regrets.

But in truth, we read a lot of Sendak. And we like him a lot. Here’s a little tribute from Simon. The video was taken a few months ago.

For his part, Oliver is just as in love with the rest of the Nutshell Library. We’ve been through Alligators All Around many many times as Oliver learns his alphabet and now that he’s learning numbers, One Was Johnny is on heavy rotation. And don’t get me started on Chicken Soup With Rice. I try my best to sing it how I learned it in first grade, but I’m really not a singer. The boys are forgiving, however. (What they are not forgiving of is actually having to eat chicken soup with rice – it sounds way better in song than it does when it’s in a bowl staring you in the face.)

So thank you, Mr. Sendak, for your contribution to society. And to my children’s childhoods. I appreciate it.

“Well, maybe Heavenly Father could help you get into the school you really want to get in to.”

“But how would Heavenly Father do that?”

“Heavenly Father could maybe make it so your name came up early on when they start assigning kids to schools.”

“But how?”

“I don’t really know how He does it, but I know that Heavenly Father can do things like that.”

“But how else could he answer my prayer?”

“Well, if you don’t get into the school that you want, then He could help to feel peace and not worry about what school you will be going to. He could help you to know that even if you don’t get into the school you want, things will still be okay.”

“But how would he answer the part about snakes?”

“Hmmmm. I think that Heavenly Father would probably help you learn to understand snakes. Like maybe if we went to the library and got a book about snakes he would help us to understand what the book was talking about. And you know what? I really don’t like snakes. I don’t like to be close to them and they kind of scare me and I really don’t like them. So maybe if we learned about snakes Heavenly Father would help me to understand them so I wouldn’t be scared of them and I might even learn to be grateful for them.”

He seemed appeased by my answers, but I kind of get the feeling that I’m talking to myself more than I am to him. I guess that is one reason we have kids: so they can get us to say the things we need to hear.

He was also wearing it a year later while my bothers competed over who was going to be the favorite uncle.

And he wore it today while he and his brother flew around the apartment on their brooms.

And he’s worn it a hundred times in between. It wasn’t until today that I noticed that the sleeves are getting to be a little short. And the hood actually fits his head pretty well now. And then I realized that the kid is 2 1/2 years old and has been wearing that hoodie for 2 years.

Just a random fact. And also, I think it’s time to put it away.

We just had some neighbors over for dinner. We had a great time and we are super excited to know another couple in our building. But it also shone a spotlight on our quirkiness once again. You people already know this about us, but it was funny to hear us say it again to people who we sort of just met.

“Actually, Lizzie made that bread.”

“It’s homemade? That’s amazing!”

“Micah made the noodles in the lasagna as well.”

“Really? It’s so good!”

“Is this salad dressing homemade, too?”

“Um, yeah, actually, it is.”

“Oh, those boxes? Yeah, Micah made those. Just from some scraps we picked up from Craigslist.”

“And I reupholstered this chair as well.”

By the end of the night we decided it was probably best that we didn’t get around to making ricotta cheese to spread on the homemade bread.

Our motto seems to be “Why buy it when you can make it?” (I submit for evidence the fact that our elder child once told us we needed to find a recipe and get the ingredients for blue angry bird gummy candies.)

When we were planning this party, Simon had big ideas. He wanted a “Milky Way” themed party, with all the planets, and then somehow — and we have no idea where this came from — but he was going to be Santa, Oliver and I were going to be the flying reindeer, and Micah was going to be the sled. And he told this to anyone who would listen, much to our amusement.

Santa didn’t happen. And the Milky Way didn’t really either. But the solar system did. And what kid is going to complain when he has nine cakes sitting on a table in front of him?

So here are the details: I made 1 full-size (9-inch round) cake. I baked up two 28-ounce can-fulls of cake batter. (Simon’s actual birthday cake, pictured in the previous post, was practice for this “cake in a can” thing. And it meant we don’t have tons and tons of birthday cake leftover. Hooray!) And I made 9 cupcakes as well. One of the cupcakes got eaten by Oliver for breakfast. (The little punk thinks he’s in charge of the food supply around here.) The big cake got iced into a sun. The two cans of cake got split up into the four gaseous giants. Four of the cupcakes became the four small planets. And we used a little bit of another cupcake to make a moon. We were going to do the dwarf planets too, but we ditched that idea at the last minute. Sorry, Pluto. You didn’t make the cut.

And then we packed up all our cakes into a box, put it on top of our jogging stroller, put Oliver in one seat, the healthy food (fruits, veggies, cheese, and crackers) in the other seat, sat Simon on his bike, and walked 2 miles to the park so we could throw a party.

One of my friends, when she saw what we had done — cakes and all — said, “Did it at any time cross your mind that this was actually a reasonable thing to do?” To which I replied, “No. Of course not.”

It may not have been reasonable, but we rarely are reasonable when confronted with the possibility of constructing the entire solar system out of cake in honor of our little space man.

Aside from that, we snacked, talked, ran around in the dirt, played on a huge tree stump, chased a ball, decorated spaceships (shown above — our sons clearly inherited my patience for pointless crafts . . .), got dirty, and everything else that makes for an awesome birthday party.

And then we packed up our stroller, put the kid back on the bike, and walked home, stopping briefly to admire the water fountain outside the Brooklyn Museum.

A perfect day for our perfect little boy (and his perfect little brother, who will undoubtedly be talking about the birthday party like it was his own for the next 3 months).