Elias' birthday

Elias turned 9 yesterday. He got to be off school for a snow day. That is not a common occurrence when your birthday is at the end of March. He had a really good day. He had his favorite breakfast of pancakes and bacon, played in the snow for about 2 hours, watched tv, played with his Legos, and played on the computer.  And he didn't have any homework to do, to top it all off.  Then Josh brought home a Colasessano's pizza for dinner. We always let the birthday boy or girl choose what we have for dinner on the night of their birthday, even if we aren't really celebrating their birthday on the day of their birthday. Though the picture is blurry, you will notice that in the picture above, the candle is stuck in the pizza. You will also notice that Elias is holding the lighter. He just recently learned how to use the child-safe lighter and is very proud of his newly acquired skill and asked to light his own candle, which he proceeded to do three times.
Then we surprised Elias by telling him we were going to take him to Dairy Creme Corner for dessert. It just opened up for the season last week and we have not been there yet this year. He was thrilled. I will confess, Elias and I were both still in pajama pants and t-shirts. I had never changed out of mine and Elias had put his pajama pants back on after coming in from playing outside, soaked completely through to his underwear despite wearing snow pants. So I told him we both had to change before we could leave. I needn't have bothered. In the course of the 20 minutes it took for us to eat our ice cream, there were three different people at three different times that came in in pajama pants. We would have fit right in!
So, all in all, Elias had a great birthday. I am so proud of him.  He has such a good heart and big conscience (which helps put mamma's mind at ease a little!).  He has a great sense of humor and loves to be around people and to make people laugh. He arrived just before our 9th wedding anniversary, so he has been with us for half of our marriage now. We had prayed for almost 5 of those years to have a child. He was well worth the wait!

Elias made this snow robot with our neighbor boy, Brady. He was so proud of it, he asked for my phone to take a picture, so I would post it on Facebook. Since he made it on his birthday, I thought it would be appropriate to share here too. I was pretty impressed with the size of it, since they had made it themselves.