A birthday and a tournament

Coming back after being gone for just over a week  meant the first part of this week was spent getting back into  some kind of routine (which isn't, frankly, very interesting).

On Friday, Oliver turned five. This has been a bitter-sweet birthday for me, because as delightful as Oliver can be, I miss that baby face of his. (And as he's the last of my babies, it's harder to see him hit milestones that we won't hit again).

(I tried to get a good birthday picture. As you can tell, he wasn't making it easy. For some reason, he can't look at the camera.)

For his birthday, Oliver had his first-ever birthday party (okay, non-family party). We were trying to keep it fairly low-key, so we planned mostly water activities outside. We invited a bunch of little kids, figuring it was summer and not everyone would come. So of course, everyone came--including his cousin Maggie, who was in town unexpectedly that day.

The kids played pin the tail on the cat (somehow I got the idea that it would be easier to paint my own cat than do a simple line drawing).

They got to blow bubbles outside, and try a funny relay where they were supposed to grab a water balloon, run across the lawn to a chair, sit on their balloon and pop it, then run back to the next person in line. Except the water balloons were unexpectedly sturdy and most of the kids were too light to pop them with their weight alone, so Dan had to help most of them.

Then, we handed out cheap squirt guns to all the kids. That kept them occupied for a good 30 minutes (and would have been more except the party was drawing close to its end). Even the girls (esp. Evelyn) got into it. Unfortunately, Dan was the target of more than one kid--and one of the little boys got stung but wouldn't let anyone look at it except his mom, so we had to call her back. (As soon as the stinger was out, he was back to running around like it never happened).

When everyone was wet, we laid out some towels on the grass and handed out ice cream cake. The kids must have been hungry because they ate an impressive amount. After ice cream, we opened presents inside and then the parents (thankfully) started arriving. All in all, a successful birthday for Mr. Obi.

 (He asked for the cat, btw)

We had dinner that night at the Ninja, at Oliver's request. Sarah was in town with her girls, so it was a larger than usual group. Andrew tried (and I think liked?) the beef udon, and Oliver of course wanted miso soup and California rolls.

Evelyn managed to photobomb yet another presentation of the birthday dessert. (We have a great picture of her doing the same thing at my birthday last year).

Also--apparently we go to the Ninja often enough that our server recognizes our names. He told me he's signed up for my class this fall. :)

Saturday morning was the Tae Kwon Do tournament as part of the Utah Summer games. Andrew competed in the novice category--it was pretty interesting to watch. Mostly more advanced players come to the games, so a lot of the lower levels are mostly local kids (and they have a pretty wide range of ages competing--Andrew was in a category with two younger kids, one much younger).

Here's Andrew doing his form competition and a video of him sparring. He got second in sparring (out of four) and I was pleased for him, if only because it would have hurt his ego to lose to the two younger kids. He's got a lot to learn still, but he's slowly improving.

 Andrew with his teacher, Master Johnny Oh, and the rest of his class who were in the games. We really like Master Johnny, who's a class-act. He works with international students at the university, and the proceeds of the class he teaches go to the local crisis center. I know Andrew might progress faster at a regular martial arts studio, but we really like this class.

That afternoon, we took Evelyn, Lydia, and Oliver to see Cars 3. It was a cute movie (I liked the twist at the end), but the short before it was even better.

Yesterday also seemed to be the day that Oliver determined to prove that 5 was not, in fact, any better than 4: he dripped some of Andrew's ink from a marker set all over the coffee table and floor in the front room (luckily most of it washed off), I spent most of my time in the movie trying to wrangle him so he wouldn't stand up in his chair or kick the seat in front of him, and when we got to Bubby and Poppy's after the movie to pick up Andrew (who hadn't wanted to see it), Oliver knocked the door off the closet, where it crashed into the window and smashed a lovely ceramic planter.

To be fair, he has been better today, which is a good thing: we had the biggest primary today that we've had since I was called: 5 visitors in junior primary and 9 in senior primary (considering we only had 13 other kids in senior primary, the visitors nearly doubled the size).

Happy Father's Day to all our readers! Dan got to put together a Guardians of the Galaxy lego set with his kids (I'll admit, I bought it solely because it had baby Groot) and take a short nap on the couch before Oliver decided to wake him up.