It's Not In My Nature To Be Mysterious, But I Can't Talk About It, And I Can't Talk About Why

It happened this past Saturday. My boy is a whole handful of fingers now. The big cinco. And he starts KINDERGARTEN NEXT WEDNESDAY! This is a whole lot of bigness to take in during one 10-day period.

We decided this year to just make his day just a fun day with us. No official party, just 12-hours during which we pretty much catered to his every whim. He seemed OK with that. His morning started with a bang - orange frosted cinnamon rolls!

Then his first present: A giant National Geographic wall map of the world. For months he's been very interested in locating any new place being discussed, but he's been limited to searching on a little stuffed globe his Nina gave him when he was two. It was time to move on.

After breakfast the family took a trip up I-85 to the Mayfield Dairy Plant. I've been wanting to take him there for about a year. They do tours at this plant and I just knew he was going to be mesmerized by all the bottling machinery and dairy processing. In reality, however, the tour was really lame. A video. Then you look through a couple of windows at some vats where they pasteurize milk (nothing in motion). You look through another window at a truck hooked up to a hose. The grand finale: Another video. But we got the kids some ice cream at the end and they got to take a picture by a giant cow in the baking sun, so it wasn't a total loss.

After chugging back down I-85 for a while, enjoying the a/c and listening to Neil Diamond, we went out for pizza at Antico, pretty much the most awesome pizza you will ever experience in your whole life. And they import their cheese from buffaloes in Italy, and we're pretty sure if you're a cheese producing buffalo in Italy, you're probably pretty happy. I mean, who'd bother a buffalo anywhere? Not me. And if you're a human who gets to live in Italy, you must be so amazingly happy just to be there they you wouldn't ever consider abusing a buffalo, would you? And that's just one other reason we love Antico. For the happy buffaloes.

Here's Andrew with his best pal, Mickey, watching pizza dough being tossed up in the air while awaiting our own margherita pie. Mickey is a constant fixture under Andrew's arm these days. I couldn't find Andrew today when trying to get everybody in the car for a market run, and that's because he was upstairs bandaging Mickey's arm. He had apparently suffered quite the abrasion playing with sidewalk chalk this morning on the driveway.


After pizza, we stopped home long enough to leave Daddy with a resting little sister, and The Precious and I headed out to Chuck E Cheese. Only the love of a mother for her son. And then, only on his birthday. I got a Sprite and 25 tokens and that $8.50 bought one birthday boy an hour's worth of glee. The highlight was when Andrew hit the jackpot on the Monster Truck game and 200 tickets came flying out!


And I had been just pondering all these "games" and their "jackpots" and was pretty sure that no one had ever landed a jackpot in Chuck E Cheese in all this history of the world. The tickets kept coming out for so long that Andrew started to get pretty stressed about it. But in the end, all those tickets bought him a bag of cotton candy and he couldn't wait to get home and tell Dad all about his big win.

We got home and had birthday cupcakes, strawberry with butter cream frosting per his request. I took a little video of us singing to him, and our quirky little man didn't let us down.

After cupcakes, there were more presents (his own alarm clock, a board game and a Hard Hat Harry video all about garbage and recycling (whoo hoo!). Then it was off with Mommy again for supper at McDonald's (french fries and apple slices ... please don't call the supper police) then miniature golf at this awesome little place only 10 miles away that I just found out existed.

Speaking of golf, My Precious just loves watching golf. Very weird. Phil is actually taking the day off on Monday to take Andrew to a practice round of the PGA Tour! And we think he's going to enjoy it! And he's now just wild over putt putt and can't wait 'til he's old enough to go smack the ball as hard as he can at a real course. A while back my father graciously gave us some child-size clubs that were my brother Andrew's when he was little, so in another couple years I hope my own Andrew will be big enough (and still interested enough) to enjoy them. Snif.

And here's a fun story .... I was recently giving Elsbeth a bath when I realized that the kids' toilet was due for it's bi-annual cleaning. I squirted some soap in and was leaving it to do something important when Andrew saw it and asked to help. I decided a big 5-year-old might be able to handle such an important chore, so he ran off after the brush. After several minutes of him scrubbing away with me giving minimal instruction from my comfortable perch by the tub, I told him he was doing a fantastic job and all I needed to do was show him how to squirt the cleaner in and he could take over potty cleansing duty for the house. He was delighted and replied with glee, "Yes! I could do it all by myself and you could go read a book!"

That's my boy.

Happiest of happy birthdays to you, The Cutest Boy In The World!