A Very, Merry Un-Birthday to Noah!

This year, Noah’s third birthday falls on Tuesday.  Originally we were planning on taking him to Disneyland that day, but Mark’s so swamped at work he couldn’t take the day off.  Additionally, Noah’s school is holding a Meet The Teachers event that night which I plan on attending.  So, given that Mark is unavailable during the day and I’ll be gone in the evening, we decided instead to celebrate the boy’s birthday early and tell him that his birthday was on Sunday.

On Saturday, Mark and I sent the boy off with Clarita to hang out at the playground while we went to Toys R Us to pick up his present — a new bike.  We could’ve gotten it assembled at Toys R Us but it was going to take two hours and we had a dinner reservation at Bo Innovation to make.  Besides, I told Mark, it would be fun to put our son’s first real bike together ourselves.  Mark, sensing impending calamity and time-wasting, was reluctant but after offering to put the bike together by myself he consented to taking the bike back home in pieces.

That night after dinner, I got to work turning this:

into this:

Not bad if I do say so myself. Especially considering that I had drank most of the champagne at dinner (because I drank fast while Mark was still finishing off his gin and tonic) and watched Dan in Real Life while I was assembling it.

Sunday morning, Noah woke up hellishly early (as usual) so when Mark and I were finally able to drag ourselves out of bed, we started off the morning with a traditional birthday doughnut:

Followed by presents. Here is Noah opening up his Batman birthday card that he received from Grandma and Grandpa:

My parents had asked me to pick up a present for Noah and here he is opening it:

They got him the ClickStart My First Computer (he calls it his “puter”). I also threw in a Finding Nemo game from them just for kicks and only barely stopped myself from making them get him the Toy Story game as well (it’s very dangerous to shop for children with other people’s money):

Here is Noah on his new bike, which he refers to as his “racing bike”. That’s a bad sign, right?  Although compared to his “crashing tricycle”, a racing bike might not be so bad.

Mark started performing some quality control checks on the bike so he spent the next hour fixing some of the small details that I had missed, like screwing some of the bolts on the wrong way or assembling the handlebars so that the handbrakes were facing the wrong way. We ran into some trouble when he tried to inflate the tire and we eventually determined that the tire had a leak, so while the boy took a nap, Mark took the bike to a bike repair shop. In addition to replacing the tire, they were nice enough to make some further adjustments to the bike. Apparently in my haste, distraction and champagne buzz the night before, I had failed to notice that I had put the handlebars on backwards. In my defense, Mark hadn’t noticed it either until the bike shop guy mentioned it, but I also think it vindicates the earlier placement of the handbrakes — the handbrakes would’ve been fine if I’d only gotten the handlebars on the right way.

Later, Mark took Noah to WiseKids — Noah’s favorite toy store located down the hill from us — and then we all met up at the Pokfulam Market — an open air market in Cyberport – across the street.  Mark later told me that while they were at WiseKids, he had told Noah that he could pick out any one thing in the store and Mark would buy it for him — a potentially dangerous offer in a store that sells things like kid-sized Porsche and BMW replicas.  Luckily for us, Noah choose a tube of rubber sea animals.  Whew!  Here he is showing off his whales at the market:

We had dinner out and when we came back, we celebrated with an ice cream cake:

Of course, it’s not a cake by my sister-in-law Lien, but the cookies-and-cream ice cream made up for any shortcomings creativity-wise.  Besides, it had candles.  And the boy loves candles:

While Mark got Noah ready for bed, I got to work making cupcakes for Noah’s class. His teachers sent me a note saying they would celebrate Noah’s birthday in class on Monday so I decided to make devil’s food cupcakes for it. Here they are pre-icing:

And after I dipped them in a chocolate ganache glaze and added sprinkles:

In hindsight, preschoolers might not really care about devil’s food and ganache, but it makes eating the leftovers and any “accidents” that much more fun for me.