Birthday Weekend

Two weekends ago, we got to celebrate Laila's 2nd birthday and Rylan's 1st birthday. (Confession and realization - Kirk and I suck at photodocumenting Jaisal's life. We took a camera with us to both birthdays, but failed to take any pictures of Jaisal with the birthday celebrants. We're usually so busy talking to people and running around after little man that pictures are an afterthought.)

At Laila's birthday, Jaisal spent a lot of time pushing around Laila's baby stroller and chasing down the dog Marley. Little man has a serious obsession with dogs and animals generally, so we knew we could get some time to socialize with the adults since he would be preoccupied with Marley.

Rylan's birthday party was a veritable wonderland for Jaisal. Chris's brother and sister-in-law have a huge basement with every toy imagineable, so Jaisal had a ton of fun playing down there (ignoring all the other kids in the process). He also went inside his first inflatable jump house. He hasn't quite mastered jumping so he enjoyed having daddy jump for him.

The best moment of it all, was when someone said that if she hadn't been reading the blog, she wouldn't know that Jaisal had ever been sick. It's great to know that on so many levels little man is just a kid, labs, biopsies, rejection risks, immune suppression aside, he's just a normal little 19-month old running around and enjoying life.

Acadia was a pro running around in the jump house, but managed to have some fun crawling around with daddy as well.

The birthday boy slept through a significant part of the early part of his birthday, but we were lucky enough to see him for a little bit. Jaisal loved feeding him some puffs.

 

Rylan's birthday also was a bit of a surreal experience for Kirk and I. A lot of people at the party follow our blog and were so happy to see Jaisal in person doing so well. Conceptually, I understand that people read this blog and know what is going on in our lives, but it still caught me off guard a bit to talk to people that I knew (having met them at Scott and Chris's wedding and at Acadia's first birthday party) but that really knew us. And then it hit me. All these people had been pulling for Jaisal and still are. I definitely had to take a moment to step away and compose myself, because it's just so amazing to know how many people care about the little man. We're really lucky to have such wonderful people in our lives.