Birthdays for serial killers.

And with a mix of both apprehension and earnest buffoonery, our girls plunge headfirst into their third year of life.

Happy birthday, wee little munchkins! Oh what a year it has been. I indulged myself with a reread of the first few bloggity posts, and I'm amazed at what has transpired during this spin around the sun. This time last year, neither of you were walking (though Lily was seriously considering it), barely any English was crossing your lips, and there was certainly nothing resembling the spontaneously-dancing, number-reciting, song-singing, potty-searching girls that I've come to know and love these more recent months.

I almost decided to do a step-by-step comparison of you guys right now with a year ago today, but it seems rather unproductive, and misses the point of all that this blog is about. I don't want to tinker with the beautiful linearity, the common daily thread we've laid out that leads you from then to now. It's been too amazing a process to cheapen it with tricks. Suffice it to say, you guys bear almost no resemblance to yourselves of a year ago, in so many fascinating and irascible ways.

Despite the groaning and grumbling I may have injected into my posts about this accursed blog - and despite the verbal denouncements you might have been unfortunately subjected to while around my person - I consider myself lucky to have started it, for one clear and immitagable reason: every night I am forced to spend a good chunk of time concentrating on the two most ridiculous parts of my life. Surely there are worse sentences in the world.

I hate feeling that today, their actual birthday, was a bit anti-climactic, because I feel wholly responsible, and am pretty sure this will lead invariably to some serial killer tendencies later in life. But we'd made the decision a while ago that it was a busy weekend, it's only their 2nd birthday, they'll never remember it, so we just had some more cake tonight after dinner, tried to get them to say, "I'm two!" (didn't work), and that was about the extent of it. Jen let them watch a little extra Curious George during the day. When they wanted to be held upside down for a long time, we did it a lot longer than we normally would have. The small extra things. I hope they won't judge us too harshly in the years to come ("My 2nd birthday was terrible! I hate you guys!")

Or, if we play it just right, we can instill in them a very important life lesson, which is this: sometimes two day old cake with your parents is going to be your best option. Learn to like it.

Day three hundred and sixty four/five (don't miss tomorrow's exciting cliffhanger!) (crap, now i have to think of an exciting cliffhanger)

ps. I can't let a really cute moment of Lily's go unmentioned. She wanted to go up to the potty tonight, so she climbed the three steps onto the landing, looked back at me and kept yelling, "Potty! Stairs! Daddy!"

"Yeah we'll go to the potty in just a second. Hold on, " I told her. Apparently she wasn't in the mood to wait. She craned her neck to peer upstairs and yelled, "Pootttty! C'mere!"

Both kids blew the candle out. They're getting the hang of this birthday thing.

Mick Jagger loves cake.


Abby eats her cake like a squirrel. That pastry is squeezed in between her paws.