Our boys turned five (W-man) and three this past week (D-man) and we thought we’d show you a tour of pictures as to how we celebrated here in North Africa.
Poor W-mans birthday began the night before when I burned the cakes for school and his party to a crisp in the oven. Naturally I had used the last of my flour, sugar and butter to make said cake and it was bedtime for me when this happened. North Africa has a wonderful variety of restaurants so at 11pm our doorbell wrung and the local restaurant delivered a non-burnt cake to our house (oops!)
Then less then a week later we were able to celebrate D-man turning three years old. This was a very busy day for us so we are doing his family party later next week but we made sure to pack the day with lots of fun!
So grateful for these two boys. They are full of life, and personality and it was such fun celebrating them back to back! Birthdays are rather low key events here as in Mslm culture it is customary to only celebrate the two Eids and not birthday or anniversaries. One of the funnest moments was when my parents called and woke D-man up to sing to him. He opened his sleepy eyes to the skype call and when they had finished singing he smiled up at them and then started singing the arabic version of happy birthday. When they didn’t pick up the chorus he became very disturbed…in his mind the english and arabic singing of happy birthday ought to always come back to back and it didn’t make sense that Grandma and Grandpa didn’t know this simple “fact” of birthday life.
I love how much birthdays are the same wherever we find ourselves, all about reflecting on the blessing of that person and so special just because we are doing it together. Happy birthday sweet boys!
The bathroom! That is hysterical! Good for you for letting him do it. 🙂 Did the rest of you join him for the meal in there? 🙂