second birthday

Elijah turned TWO on December 11th!

We started the day with a delicious Eggo waffle, followed by the first round of opening birthday presents, which included a toy telephone and a new outfit from Grandma and Grandpa Ferguson. Then we played together till lunch. While Elijah was napping, another set of presents, this time from Grandma Shannon, arrived at the door: cars, a spider man, blocks and more outfits. Of course, Elijah wanted to play with them all as soon as he got up. He knew what cars were and what to do with them, but he wasn't so sure about the spider man. The blocks looked neat, but when it came right down to it he didn't quite know how to build with them. But he happily set on my lap while I played. :) Afterwards, he selected several color cylinders from the set and carried them around for a while.

Later in the day we read his favorite book for a very long time, and practiced sounds for geese, donkeys and sheep (these are the animals in the baby-Jesus-in-the-manger picture). Exciting though it was to learn the goose and the donkey sounds, nothing compared with the joy on his face when he saw pictures of puppy dogs (see bottom left picture above where Ryan captured him in the middle of saying "goggie!")

After dinner Elijah took a long celebratory bath, and he got to open one more present before bed, this time from Mommy and Daddy: doggie pajamas (oh, the bliss!) Life could hardly get any better, and yet the official birthday party was still coming a few days later. But that will have to be a separate post.


P.S. I should mention one other birthday present that had to be given to Elijah about two weeks early because he accidentally saw it and wanted it immediately. It was a baby MP3 player (the only one of the kind I was able to find) sponsored by his Russian grandparents.