CJ's 4th Birthday

I was just sitting here and thinking uh oh I haven't shared how CJ's birthday went this year. So the fact that we didn't have Halloween this year because of no power sure made it hard to wrap my head around the fact that it was my son's birthday.

He got up Tuesday morning and came into my room where I promptly wished him a happy birthday. He spent the rest of the day reminding everyone that it was his day. It wasn't easy giving him everything he wanted either. We had to go find some place that was open to get him a cake because I couldn't bake him one and while we still had one from his party it had been in a fridge that had no power for 3 days. So that was kind of out of the question. Not that he minds not having mom bake him a cake though. He just doesn't like my baking.

So we got him a cake and tried to figure out something that we could cook on the stove top for dinner that he would like. We convinced him to go with chicken alfredo. So we got everything for that and picked him up a little gift of cars and a launcher. The perfect thing for any 4 year old boy, right?

Then we came home hoping for power, but no such luck. Still cold and still without power, but CJ had his new cars and launchers so he was set. We had some lunch and the kids played some games while Joe, Alyssa, and I laid down for a nap. When we got up we started making dinner and the girls headed down to our neighbor's apartment to see if she was looking for some company tonight. She was. The girls stayed down there and we finished making dinner. When that was done we gathered the food, cake, lighter, candle, and headed downstairs to share CJ's birthday with our neighbor. She at least was able to keep her kitchen warm by being able to turn her oven on. Ours wouldn't light for us. We could only get the stove top to work on ours. So it was nice to at least get to warm up. We had dinner, cake, sang happy birthday, and played games by candlelight for most of the night. CJ was wiped pretty quickly after all the excitement and ended up falling asleep in Daddy's lap. After completing our game we gathered our stuff and headed back up to our cold apartment. And that was CJ's 4th birthday. One to remember for sure. Here are some pictures of his cake...

Thank you to our neighbor for helping us keep warm and give CJ a good time on his birthday. I am relieved that CJ has never been upset by anything he didn't get to have when we were without power. It was a tough time for a child having the power go out during his party, having to not go out trick or treating, and then finally spending his birthday without power. But he seemed to enjoy it all none the less even though he didn't get exactly what he would have wanted if things were working the way they should have been. So I'm very proud of my boy for keeping positive through everything and embracing the power outage. The kids all did great considering.