First I must apologise to our loyal blog fans. This posting is about two weeks late. Tyler turned 5 at the end of January. It was quite the big to-do. He had several friends over on Saturday for his first friend birthday. I think the total number of kids ended up being 12. It was a blast! 5 is exactly the right age for a group birthday and 1.5 hours is the exact right duration. A benefit for me was now we are being invited for
playdates from some of the children who were at our house for the party. Fun Fun. Sunday we celebrated with family here at the house. We welcomed a whole new fleet of robots from planet
Cybertron (Transformers). The Monday after his birthday I took a treat to his school for snack and read a book. It was so fun to see my shy guy playing with his friends at school. There are some kids that even follow HIM around and want to do what he is doing. Allie had a fun time visiting preschool that day too. She toddled around the area and managed to find every box of markers and make earnest attempts at removing the caps. I think I managed to get to her in the nick of time before she wrecked something. No more birthdays in our house now for eight months. What kind of planning is that?
We had our first bowling adventure last weekend. Babies R Us people got together to celebrate our former manager, Deb, and to wish her well in her new adventures. We claimed a bumper bowl lane for ourselves and outfitted the kids in dorky shoes and 6 pound balls. They had a nice ramp from which to launch the balls. Even little Allie could just push the ball down the hill and it eventually got down to the pins. Our only complaint is that because the balls were rolling so slowly that if the finger holes were not rolling truly end over end the ball listed to one side or another. Tyler's backward through the legs tosses seemed to work much better! If only it wasn't so expensive! 4 bucks just for a pair of kiddie shoes! 
