If you are four and you know it!

In a blaze of cake and glory, Adam and Royce turned four! We celebrated the big event with a pirate- Tinker Bell party at our new favorite by default venue, the Manhattan Clubhouse (a communal space associated with our apartment complex). Apartments here are pretty small and thus birthday parties are mostly hosted outside of one’s home. (This being said we did manage to get 25 people in our apartment for a combined Albie-Adam-Royce lasagna dinner, though only half of the folks could sit down). The twins’ party was a lot of fun. The pirates and Tinker Bell fairies peacefully co-existed, with only a small amount of birthday boy and birthday girl aggressive sword play.

When Adam and Roycie came up with this theme for their parties, we toyed with the idea of renting a junk boat and re-enacting Peter Pan all day long. Luckily we quickly bypassed this idea or the weather would have created havoc with our party plans. Apparently May and June and July are indeed the rainy season here. It rained all day long on the twins’ birthday in such a solid strong way that little else was possible except playing in the Clubhouse. There is an elaborate weather warning system here for rain storms, typhoons and whatever else comes our way. While it is all based sadly on previous storms and disasters, the system today seems oddly arbitrary to us newcomers. For example, the rain storm on the twins’ birthday was an amber storm with a notice put up in the lobby of our apartment building. Nothing was cancelled or shut down (I think that happens with red and black storms) but we all went around with our own collection of associations with the color amber.

Most people say to us that they cant believe Adam and Royce are four, meaning that they are so large in size they would have thought they were older. (And we also say we cant believe they are four, thinking they were just toddlers the other day) Now that Adam and Royce are actually four, they have a large attitude to go with their age and size. They are adamant about being big kids. Our family has long called them the "babies" but this just wont fly anymore. We cant even sing Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool with out amending the lyrics from little boy to "the big boy (and big girl) who lives down the lane." It is definitely a new age over here!