My Big 4 Year Old!!

Last week was Noah's fourth birthday.  I just can't believe my "baby" is so old!  It seems like just yesterday that he arrived and yet I also can't remember what life was like before he was here.  He continues to be the most affectionate, expressive, passionate, imaginative child.  His first true love continues to be everything horse, although he is finally branching out to enjoy other things too.  He is awesome at sports, specifically throwing and catching a football, hitting a baseball and even playing frisbee.  He's been doing much better with Bennett's homeschool than I thought he would.  He either does school right along with us, coloring, working on writing and joining in on our math lessons, or he just finds ways to play on his own for a while.  Plus he's joining in on the memory work and amazes me with what he picks up just hanging around while we work.  He can say all of the states in alphabetical order, all of the history sentences Bennett's learned, lots of Bible verses and he's learning to skip count by 2's, 3's, etc.  We still have self control issues and he tends to get really upset, really easily.  But we're working on it and I see progress all the time.  He's just growing up and that's all there is to it!!

So, over the weekend we had his Ice Cream Man birthday party.  We invited our cousins and a couple of neighbors to the backyard for games and ice cream.  It turned out to be great weather (although not hot enough for the water games we had originally planned) and a really fun time!  My sister took nearly 200 pictures of the day.  I won't share them all but here are a few of my favorites!

The cousins getting ready for the party.  I love the look on Brock's face!

Do you think he was excited about his party?

Thanks to some of my favorite blogs and my new pinterest obsession, I had some fun ideas for the food.  Sweet Petits on tiny sugar cones made our "ice cream cones", cupcakes baked into cake cones with icing on top to look like soft serve, fruit kabobs, veggies in a cup with ranch at the bottom of each, etc.  It turned out cute!

Noah's Ice Cream Parlor, complete with the Melissa & Doug ice cream set

Noah blowing out the candles

Total concentration on the balloon & pool noodle game

Me and my sweet boy!

All of the party goers

The kids spot the ice cream man!!

Noah with all of his presents...and there were alot of them!!

A rare family picture

Even more rare, one of Shane and me