Harrison's 5th Birthday

Lance and I got back from our trip and had a few days before Harrison turned five.  The boys had such a fun time with their grandmommy and granddaddy and were sad to see them go.  The morning that they left, I caught this picture which perfectly illustrated the week:
Davis apparently was glued to my dad's side and Harrison was my mom's little shadow.  We are so thankful for their help and hope they were able to recover after all of their early mornings at our house!

This year, for Harrison's birthday, we decided to have it at Monkey Joe's instead of at our house.  The kids had a fantastic time and I was overly thrilled with how easy the staff made it for us.  We had a "party concierge" and he literally did everything for us!  This may just be the norm, but as our first experience having a party away from home, I was just amazed.
I thought Lance was going to be a little late due to work, but he made it just in time to get a family picture before the crowd arrived.

The kids had a blast and I think Harrison got to play with all of his friends...

Davis and his buddy Sam

Longtime buddies!

The birthday boy was loving his birthday chair!

The ladies...

The 2nd kiddos!  Its hard to believe how big they are all now!

This reminded me of a picture that we took at the aquarium when all of our oldest ones were about to turn two...

Lance had a really busy work week when we got back from our trip so he didn't have time to make Harrison a cake.  I told him that Harrison would be thrilled to go to Publix to pick out his own cake, and boy was he!  He wanted a monster truck cake but they didn't have all the pieces, so we settled on Batman.

 Happy birthday big boy!  Ahhhh!  I can't believe I have a five year old!

The boys loved the arcade games that Lance let them play...

Grandma and Granddaddy were so nice to come to the party!  They were such a big help in keeping track of these guys!

The party was actually the day before Harrison's birthday.  When Harrison woke up on the big day, he was so excited to find this

He said he thought Santa put them there.  As soon as he was up, he wanted to open presents.  We let him open a few before breakfast and the theme of the year was Legos!

Thankfully I had a big helper to help make the breakfast feast that Harrison chose - pancakes, eggs and bacon. 

 

First he sorted

and then he built...project, after project, after project.  He spent the entire weekend (aside from baseball practice!) building Lego sets.

I then spent the rest of the week trying to figure out how I was going to organize the Legos!  Most of the ideas that I ran across involved sorting the Legos by color.  Great idea in theory, but come on...with a two year old and four year old, I just did not see that being our reality.

I ran across a product called the Swoop Bag which was genius, so I set out to create my own version.  I am still in shock at how well I recreated the bag!  The project was little more in-depth than I originally thought, but it came out exactly as I imagined.

To play, it opens to this:

And when you're finished it closes to this:

You can see we have plenty of room to expand and the bag creates a great play space to sort, build and create.

Harrison we are so proud of you for the big boy that you are!  You are a smart-as-a-tack, thoughtful, kind, fun, caring, enthusiastic, silly, silly, silly five year old boy!  We love you to the moon and back!  I asked Harrison a series of questions, that I hope to continue throughout the years, to keep track of his interests, and here they are:

 I should have expanded his final answer...he said that he wanted to be a fireman, then he said, "no, I want to be my daddy, so that I can go to work at Home Depot with him everyday"...break my heart!

Happy birthday buddy!