Melanie's Birthday

We celebrated Mimi's "happy day" with a nice steak dinner at home.



Making a wish ...



and blowing out the candles. Yummy cupcakes.



Sam loves birthdays, but he was not exactly thrilled that there no presents for him. He helped Mimi open her presents, then watched her blow out her candles. He didn't want a cupcake -- he wanted to blow out the candles.



Borders opened a new bookstore near our house. They had Dora and Boots there for story time the opening weekend.



There were lots of kids there to see Dora and hear the story.



Sam was overwhelmed with the crowd, but interested in Dora. He was ready to leave after we saw her.



We've been doing a lot of arts and crafts lately. Sam is very interested in painting.



Sam found some old tempora paints in one of the boxes that hadn't been unpacked yet.



We painted with sponges and brushes ...



and fingers!



He liked painting so much that I got him some watercolors and a Dora coloring book.



He liked them so much that he painted until it was all gone. He really liked painting with black. I don't understand why they include black in kids paints. Once he gets black on his brush, all the other colors turn into a muddy gray-brown.



I thought Sam was finally old enough to get some play-doh, so we got this cute duffle bag of four colors and some toys.



I think Melanie and I were more excited about it than Sam was.



It was funny to see Sam play with the play-doh. He mostly pounded on it.



I was very proud of my little play-doh turtle.



Sam asks to play with the play-doh all the time now. He mostly just wants to dump it out of the cans and smash it, but he really likes it when we roll it out for him so he can cut out shapes.

Here are some random pictures of Sam hanging out around the house and being silly ...