It’s hard to believe my little man is three years old today. We’ve celebrated his birthday so many times in the last two weeks, you’d think I’d be sick of the fuss, but really is there ever a bad time to eat birthday cake and get a little weepy over time passing?

It’s amazing how much he’s changed since his 2nd birthday, how much we’ve changed as a family and how much we’ve done together and grown together.

I’d like to tell you that today was the perfect day and we celebrated this milestone like the amazing parents we are and it was wonderful, but this is real life and that’s not true. We woke up in a funk – maybe the past two weeks of birthday cakes finally caught up with us in the ultimate of sugar crashes. Maybe the rainy weather two days in a row was just too much on us and left us feeling cramped and cranky. We were in a funk. MM was a typical three year old and gave cause for reprimanding constantly throughout the day. We’d run out of good humor. Having just had the written exam for Dream Company yesterday and no new news today, Dan and I both were probably feeling the reality of our situation a little too well, too. And hormonal old me was just as unhappy about the situation as I was about the fact that we were all so unhappy. It’s my baby’s third birthday – I wanted to be celebrating in some quaint, special way, not bickering, crying like a crazy pregnant woman and scolding the birthday boy all day.

It got better sometime after the much needed naptime. Dan and I talked through my feelings, I stopped crying and I tried harder. I wanted special, I needed it to be cheap and easy, so I figured it out. I wanted to mark the occasion with MM and not let it pass by, so I pulled out some photo albums and scrapbooks from the last three years and showed him pictures of himself as a baby and pictures from old birthdays and the life in between. He loved it of course, even if he didn’t get the point of why I was doing it. After dinner we had one last night of leftover cake and ice cream and I think I  can now say we are birthday’d out. I’ve celebrated sufficiently and made the small memories I was hoping for. And despite the sucky fact that I went all crazy and hormonal and cried and kicked my feet and nagged throughout the morning and afternoon, it turned into an okay day and we are fine now, at least as fine as can be expected.

I have some other stuff I want to talk about soon but I’m not going to clutter this birthday post with it – and I’d like to go veg out and watch American Idol and Fringe, so I’ll save the rest (boring health insurance junk) for later. In short summary version, happy birthday MM. I’m glad we were able to carve a few special moments into the day and even though the entire day wasn’t perfect, it was real and good – just like us. I’m probably going to throw out the rest of the birthday cake tonight before I eat all of it in a hormonal rage tomorrow.