Thomas the Tank Engine Third Birthday

I had so many great plans to do fun things with Eric today for his birthday. I had a super busy night at work last night and I had enough energy to drive home and eat breakfast. Then I crashed and burned. I did wake up in time to get some McDonald's for lunch for Natalie and Eric and then head to the elementary school. Yesterday Eric said he wanted to visit his siblings' elementary school for lunch. I'm not sure if it was because he wanted to go to their school or because he wanted a cheeseburger from McDonald's. Either way, I wanted to do what he wanted for his birthday.

Natalie's class was having a "Teddy Bear Picnic" where they got to bring their teddy bears outside while they had lunch. It was a great day for it--sunny with a nice breeze. Natalie and Eric both ate well, although I was fascinated with how Eric was eating his burger. First he stripped his meat off the bun (with much of the cheese still stuck to the meat). He ate most of the meat before eating most of one of the bun halves. I'll have to do a layout about that, one of these days.

I should have just titled this "Train Third Birthday", because Eric loves all trains, but he is most familiar with the Thomas variety. He started off the day wearing his Thomas pajamas from last night. I was only able to convince him to take those off because I had his Thomas T-shirt to change him into. After lunch, I myself was excited about the trains that I had bought him, so Patrick and I gave him one of them to open. The train he opened was "Stanley", who he has the Lego version of, and he was so excited when he saw it.

We had to wait until almost 7PM for my parents, my sister C, and my niece A to arrive. We ate dinner then again, we continued the train love with a Thomas the Tank Engine cake. He was more excited about the toys on the cake than the cake itself, but we expected that. He blew those candles out this year like a pro.

It was getting late so we quickly proceeded to the opening of the gifts. Since he was expecting trains for his birthday already, it was rather fun when he took out everything from the gift bags from both sets of grandparents and neither contained any train toys. They did have various types of transportation (including trains) on T-shirts that he showed some interest in, but no train "toys". Eric looked a bit surprised. Of course, he got plenty of other train toys. One of them was a set with "Bill" and "Ben", which are two twin engines. I asked him to show his Papa (who was videotaping) and he got up very close, as you can see in this picture. I loved seeing all the family behind Papa smile and laugh when they saw Eric do this. Very cute!

This is the last present that Eric opened. This is the one that he had asked for a few months ago. I asked him to hold the box up so I could take a picture of him with the toy, but instead of just holding it in front of him, he actually held it up over his head. We all laughed because it seemed like such a big, heavy box and he lifted it excitedly over his head.

All day Patrick and I were trying to convince Eric that he was three years old today. Every time we asked him how old he was, he would still reply "two years old". The funny part was that even when we corrected him and told him that he actually turned "three" today and that he was no longer "two", he still insisted that he was "two years old". Finally this afternoon, he started saying that he was "three". He's learning, and growing--too fast. Sniff, sniff...