Let the birthday madness begin

Dad and I are hopeless early birthday freaks. We are completely incapable of waiting until it is actually the other person's birthday to give him or her his or her birthday present. This year I got lucky because Dad didn't actually get a chance to even shop for my present until the day of, but I was also cautioning him that we need to be better for Isaac's sake. I mean, what's the fun of having a birthday when you're a kid if you don't get heaps of attention (read: presents) piled upon you on that one day, your very own special day?

Well, he doesn't know any better yet, and it's not like it's super-easy to shop without him, so you'll have to cut us some slack this year. After tossing around lots of ideas, we in the end decided on a very specific "main" present, to be lavishly decorated of course with satellite presents. Our destination for high-quality birthday fun? Why, IKEA, of course. We see and hear all the time how much he adores sitting at the wee little munchkin table they have set up for the kids at his school -- he eats there, plays there, and as of late also fingerpaints there. Now he has his very own:


Here he is, seated (which he did by himself) at his table, playing with his bead-racer thing, stuffed lamb, and stuffed rat (yes, rat -- all also from IKEA). The table is actually sized for toddlers, but our Dad is terribly handy and sawed 4 inches off the legs of the table and chair. It also comes with another chair, but since there's only one Isaac and due to the sawing bit, we thought it might be wise to save that chair for a rainy day. Or a growth-spurty kind of day.

And because it is impossible to walk through the IKEA Jr. section without diarrhea of the wallet, I let Dad get another birthday present of sorts for Isaac -- fancy new decorations to create a super-cool jungle in his room:


Dad had been lusting over those enormous leaves since Isaac was a womb-dweller, and I finally let him buy two. We also got the snake from IKEA, but Dad splurged on a singing woodpecker (hanging from the right leaf) at the hardware store when he went to get the massive trusses required to create this fancy canopy, and there is also a koala bear shimmying up the stems -- I won him in a drawing at Babies R Us when I was 3 or 4 months pregnant, and now he has a home. Isaac adores his new room decorations, pointing at them and saying "tee!" (for tree, of course) whenever we go in there.