{p,h,f,r} Henry's 4th Birthday edition!

Linking up with the Mommas at Like Mother Like Daughter...

Yesterday was Henry's birthday!!


{pretty} birthday boy. I know he's a boy. But he *is* pretty. Look at those big brown eyes, as I try unsuccessfully to get him to smile nicely for the picture..."please Mom, can I just go play now??"

Happy birthday to my sweet newly-minted four year old. What can I say about Henry at age 4? Henry has always been my sweet-natured, easy-peasy guy. He is uncommonly gentle and kind, shares readily, is almost always cooperative and reasonable...weird, for a preschooler, right? He has fiery and melancholic Tess and often uncooperative and unreasonable Jack for older siblings. The three of them are joined at the hip all day, best friends, and Henry is the sweet peacemaker of the group, so much so that I am always trying to watch that they don't bulldoze him (coughcough, tess, coughcough).

{happy} birthday presents...the pile is bigger than he is! Though we do birthdays bigger than Christmas, it's not quite as excessive as it looks. That's a tonka truck in that giant box. One of the presents is a stack of picture books. And there are some smaller sibling gifts in there.

{funny} attempts to get a decent picture of him blowing out his candles...


As is our tradition, he woke up to birthday donuts and got to open presents right away...
Henry is super affectionate and often still climbs into my lap to snuggle and asking to "play with you hay-uh (hair)". He still loves vehicles of all kinds. He wanted a "camping birthday" today. I'm not sure what exactly he was expecting on a weekday, lol, but here's his {real} picture of his camping cake (h/t Jessica at Shower of Roses). It was a very easy cake to make and came out very well!

Then Mary Claire found it....

The present rundown, just clipped to the bottom of this post for posterity...






Notice the playtent. The plan was to let them "camp" overnight in the boys' room. Only Henry made it through the night in there. The duplos are from Tess and Mary Claire. The train is from Jack. And Maria got him the baseball helmet to go with his new T ball set. Not pictured, a bike helmet from Meme and Papa(my parents) to go with his first bike!!!
Also not pictured (because they were opened a different day), Hot Wheel tracks from Grandmom (my grandmother) and a check from John's parents that we are pooling together with Tess and Mary Claire's birthday money to buy lumber for a playground John is building! We actually bought the kit (all the stuff minus lumber) with their birthday checks *last year*, thinking we would buy the lumber over the summer. Then John lost his job and was unemployed for a few months, and ah, it was no longer the best use of resources, lol. So, we have had the kit sitting in the garage ever since. Now we can finally get the lumber and build it!