Lily spent more time with Ammon than I did on his birthday and she’s sleeping now, but I’ll do my best to recreate his birthday (feel free to add, if I miss anything Lily!)
First, Ammon woke up to find balloons and presents downstairs on the table. He wanted to open up all of his presents right away, and so that is how he started the day.
After watching him open up some presents, I went to work, but then Lily made a French Toast breakfast with candles to blow out for him.
While I was at work, Ammon got to play at the kid’s area with Clarissa at the Toyota dealership while our car received maintenance. I’m not sure what Lily did with him after that, but she may have taken him to the park.
I left work a bit early to take Ammon to the arcade. It was so much fun! I loved it every bit as much as he did. It was so fun to pal around with my little man. We played a motorcycle game, threw balls at the clowns, played ski-ball, and even played “Let’s Make a Deal”. But the best game of all was a shooter arcade game for kids. You shot Zombies and your gun actually shot streams of water on the screen. We kept paying more and more until we beat the game because Ammon loved it so much. I had a great time too! Ammon, I look forward to many more fun father-son times with you.
At home, we had a yummy dinner from Sushi Burrito. Then we had a Baskin Robins Ice-Cream cake. Clarissa blew out a couple of candles (uninvited), and I eventually removed her from the table because she was distressing Ammon.
In the end, I think our little guy had a wonderful day. His favorite present was this shark blanket that also acts as a dress-up. I think that one may have been from Georgia. He kept insisting I call him Sharky and not Ammon.
There are a couple of things I want to capture about sweet Ammon at this age. First is that he is EXTREMELY outgoing. This comes out especially when we travel. He will walk up to any dog and start petting it and start talking to the owner about it. When we were in line for fry bread at Taos, he went one by one to the three people in line asking them what their names were. To our waitress at Pasta Jay’s in Moab last week, he unabashedly declared, “I love you!”. He is so warm, sweet, friendly and outgoing, and he makes so many people smile by his open sharing of love.
I also want to mention how sweet and sensitive he is. He often is bullied by Clarissa, but he wont fight back or hit almost ever. He’ll just take it and cry and he started to get use to Clarissa just always taking his stuff until Lily and I started doing better at enforcement. Also, when he fell down at Meow Wolf, he landed on someone, and he turned around and said, “are you ok?”. He’s very aware, and sensitive and sweet. I love my little Ammon.
Oh, and that is another thing. He is always falling, and getting hurt. The first day of our New Mexico Trip, he was skipping or running on the trail at Ghost Ranch and he tripped and scraped a ton of skin off his cheek. Lily was amazing to get doctor’s instructions on how to treat it so it went away mostly in a week, but it was really bad and could have easily gotten infected if we didn’t treat it so well. By the age of four he has gotten staples in his head, gotten lost and has CPS called, many many bumps and scrapes and bruises. He is just very very active, innocent and curious, and I love him all the more for it.
Ammon, thank you for being in our family and bringing us so so so much joy!