Happy Birthday Daddy!

Happy birthday Dad, from Felix.....

We have enjoyed a lovely, lazy Sunday today, made even better because it's Nathan's birthday. Felix woke up extremely early this morning. I'm telling myself it's because he wanted to be the first to wish Daddy a happy birthday, and not because he's going to get into the habit of waking up super early again. We were just getting used to our 7am sleep ins! Felix ate his porridge on our bed, like he does every morning, then he helped Nathan eat his French toast as well. Even if he's full from his own breakfast, Felix will always manage a few extra spoons full from our plates. It's the one meal of the day when he eats like a horse.

Even though our house seemed really empty for Nathan's birthday today (this time last year, we had 2 more kids still living at home, plus a very pregnant Mel), we had fun with our remaining three boys. The older boys helped Nate to set up his Playstation (He's always been an Xbox fan), and answered his questions about the games he was playing.  Felix walked up the hallway, carrying a bag of donuts for Daddy's birthday, and saying "Yum" which was pretty adorable. It was great to hear from our older 5 children who we miss so much. We had a surprise visit from Mel, who brought Noah around to wish Pops a happy birthday. They stayed for dinner with us, and we all enjoyed Nathan's requested dinner of Nachos, Salsa and Guacamole. I haven't seen Felix eat that much dinner in a while; he couldn't get enough of it!

.....and Isaiah and Aaron

There was a little bit of excitement, around lunch time, when I noticed one of our dogs chasing something across our backyard. I realised fairly quickly that it was a brown snake, so I rushed outside (in bare feet) to keep the dogs away from it, while Nathan pulled on some boots. The snake slithered into our shed and, when I opened the door, I couldn't see it for a while. There's only one thing worse than having a snake in your yard... having a snake hiding in your yard and you can't find it. Eventually I saw it underneath our BBQ and he looked pretty annoyed, thrashing around. I still didn't have shoes on, so Nate had the job of killing it while I kept the, very excited, dogs away. We haven't had a snake in the yard for a while but we'll be extra vigilant whenever Felix is outside in the near future. Unfortunately, the snakes around here are deadly, and we never know when one of them might make it's way into the yard.

It's been a great day!

Felix added another word to his repertoire today and no, it wasn't snake; although he signs snake and says, "Ssssss". He picked up a teddy bear and said, "Ahhh, teddy"as he gave it a big cuddle. His speech is coming along so well. He is making lots of new sounds and, like the bird noise he learnt at my parent's house, he mimics different sounds he hears. As well as speech, Felix is starting to take much more of an interest in learning the actions to songs. While watching Play School, in the car when we were driving last week, we noticed him copying the actions to a lot of the songs. Today, he was watching The Wiggles while he ate his lunch and stood up every so often to wave his arms or stand on his toes. He still likes singing face to face, the best. The TV is OK sometimes, but he really prefers it when we join in with him and sing and dance. This morning he and I sang (and signed) happy birthday to Daddy. Felix enjoyed it so much, we had to sing it about four times!