third b-day

I feel like I kind of failed today at celebrating Declan's third birthday. It's certainly a lot more low-key than his first birthday, which was a huge party in China with trivia games and the Chinese traditional task to determine Declan's aptitude. I made a slideshow with music and everything. Then, on his second birthday, I cooked for three hours to host a dinner party in the midst of rockets firing back and forth between Gaza and Israel. Our friends checked on the latest siren status in Tel Aviv while waiting for another friend who's scheduled to arrive by train from there, and the neighbors dropped by mid-dinner to give us our key to the bomb shelter.

Declan's third birthday consisted of his usual going into the Technion with Daniel. Being expats, we're a little out of the loop on the usual gan birthday traditions that I kind of enacted with Declan's Hebrew mommy-and-me group last year. Father and son came home an hour earlier than usual in order to catch an hour or so of playing with our friend Helen's four kids at their apartment. Then Declan chose a really crappy-tasting cake from a convenience store on the way home, and we shared it with our neighbors who also have a boy around Declan's age. I don't think anyone took pictures.

I did, earlier in the day, go to Merkaz Horev and bought a bunch of things that Declan might be interested in. I was on the fence about them being birthday presents or part of a travel kit for our flight to Europe, then purely out of feeling tired and angry about something and not through a logical process, decided that it's a travel kit. I've never been a very craft-y person, and so rarely got Declan anything much to play and make believe with outside of open-ended containers. Now that he's officially three years old, maybe I'll try harder to provide opportunities for making art. The travel kit could be a good start.

And Declan wasn't completely sans birthday present. Instead of an English-tiled Bananagrams I finally found, which would have cost 109 shekels i.e. three times the price Amazon charges, I got Declan and Joshua (Helen's youngest son, who'll be turning three also but next week) each a riding stick with horse head. They had fun galloping around indoors and then fighting over the dark-colored horse versus the caramel-colored one at parting time.

So, pretty uneventful third birthday for Declan. Lazy ima.

Right after I took this picture, Declan yelled, "No!" and ran away