Happy Birthday Jacob

Today was Jacob’s 5th birthday. I still can’t believe that my little boy is really already five years old! Every year older is a big step, but 5 years old means so much. It means he’ll be starting kindergarten this year, and he’s halfway to 10. I’m glad he’s only 5 and not older than that. I’m having a hard enough time thinking of him going away to school already.
For Jacob’s birthday, we kept up his annual favorite of making rice pudding for breakfast. We were able to put candles in it and sing Happy Birthday that morning.
Last night I took Jacob out to run a couple errands. One stop was at ToysRUs. If you sign your child up for the birthday club, they’ll send a $3 gift card on their birthday. Jacob was pretty excited to carry that around with him. He kept it in his pocket and would check every so often to make sure it was still there. It was fun to walk around the store with him trying to find a little gift that he could pick out. He was so proud to know that he was buying it with his own money. Jacob kept track of how much money he received for his birthday ($13) and after figuring out tithing, and how much his toy cost, he told me, at the checkout stand, how much money he would still have left. He did it all by himself. This boy is definitely showing an interest in money early- hopefully he’ll be a saver and bargain-shopper!
That morning Jacob was able to play with the little nerf air gun that he picked out the night before. We spend the day playing games, reading, running a few errands and letting Jacob decide what to do. He’s definitely a boy- one of his favorite aspects of his birthday was being able to choose what to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Jacob wanted to have pizza for dinner, so we drove down to pick up some pizza (and I made a little stop to get some paper for card-making…I might have a job designing cards for an outsourcing company) When we got home, Khoa came over –bringing a cute little ‘Kung-Fu Panda’ gift for Jacob, he’s too kind. We had dinner together, then opened gifts and had cake and ice cream. It was pretty low-key but we had a fun evening.
Jacob got some really fun gifts including a telescope- he’s been asking for one for months now, the movie Wall-E, a ninja turtle toy, a spiderman lunchbox- for next year, some shirts, a cool train & car that you can put together and take apart using a drills that really works & screwdrivers, plus a couple treats. He was pretty excited with how the night turned out.**