Parties and Pities

The wonderful video of Ranne having "Happy Birthday" sung to him was absent-mindedly recorded over tonight. I feel crushed. It was sooo good. Well, here are some pictures of his "Turning 3" party. Several friends came over, bringing their children, Ranne's buddies, to play for the morning. I found an "Outback" party theme idea online that would be really fun if one went all out with it for a seven-year-old, but we have a nearly-three-year-old. So all we did was hide little reptiles/dinosaurs around the yard for the kids to hunt. It was a fun time-filler and got the kids outside, though it ended up being windy and cold.

I'll include a picture of one of the dinosaurs Ranne found in the yard.

Other stuff:

Toby and Ranne's naps are not quite jiving together lately. Here's what I teach Toby to do when R's sleeping and we're bored.

With enough air pressure behind the ball, it can be shot rather far. My brother taught me this with a ping-pong ball at the student center when we were in our college-years and had too much time. Brendan would look at me, seemingly normal with the ball hidden in mouth, and then shoot the slobbery thing at my head--often. Now I teach my 16-mo old son to put similar small, round objects in his mouth when we're doing nothing productive. Look at those ears!

This morning I woke to hear Ranne fuss a tiny bit, then noticed his breathing sounded frightening. After jolting upright, hitting Scott and asking a, "Does his breathing sound strange?" question, we heard an enormous bang. He, at that moment, fell out of his bed. Scott went for him and returned with a raspy boy who had, I guess, walked across his bed in panic and fell off on his head. Scott took him to urgent care to be told he has croup. His vocal chords are swollen, making it hard for him to breath. They gave us a steroid to help the swelling. It VERY slowly got better over the day, but he just woke and it is worse again. We gave him some of his prescription just now, planning on a lighter dose in the morning. Poor thing's knot on his head is pretty big and greenish. Here he is trying to down some lunch:

So, that's the latest. Goodnight all.