i do all my own blogs: number five is alive

december 30, 2007, hayden michael skiver turned 5 years old. i can't believe it's been five years since he was born. time goes by so quickly, even some days when you're thinking how slow it's going.
hayden came out fast and furious early that morning back in 2002 and that's pretty much been the last five years of his life as well.
each year on his birthday i have thought to myself "i honestly can't believe we've made it to his birthday." i mean, i haven't ever kept a plant alive more than a few months. so to realize that i've kept this human alive for 5 years is pretty incredible to me. he obviously is quite a bit more self sufficient than he was 5 years ago, so i don't have to really worry about forgetting to feed him or anything like that. now each year it's a shocker that he's still alive because i haven't purposely killed him.
because hayden's birthday is so close to christmas i make sure to make a big deal about his birthday. it is not linked to christmas in the least and he will never grow up saying that he feels cheated out of a birthday. well, i guess he could say that but he'd be a liar.
each year we choose a theme. his first birthday was bathtime complete with rubber duck cakes. his second birthday was baby einstein with the caterpillar cake from the baby einstein movies. his third birthday was thomas the train where he had not only a thomas cake but also a percy AND james cake. his fourth birthday was mickey mouse since he was into the mickey mouse clubhouse show and we had just gone to disney world. he had a mickey, donald and pluto cake.
for his fifth birthday we decided a bowling theme would be perfect since he has been on a bowling league which will wrap up in just a few weeks (he's currently in first place, by the way). i made a bowling ball and 4 knocked down bowling pins for his cake this year.
we had a bit of a problem with the 3-d ball cake as it started sliding and falling apart about 2 hours before the party. we brought new definition to "carrot cake" as we shoved a few baby carrots under the cake and frosted them in order to prop it up. luckily the cake make it through the party and looked half way decent at least. nobody even knew about the carrots until after the fact. and once everyone had gone home, jessica and tina decided to be classy as usual and make things out of the cake and carrots that are unspeakable....although we did take pictures, one of which is below. it's pretty gross though so you may want to skip that one.
dave, myself, hayden and talan partied down with mom, dad and jessica, jenn and rainah, tina (teens), melanie and ashton howard, ashton's cousin trenton and hayden's grandma skiver. he opened presents (he even opened MOST of the cards and let me read who they were from) ate cake and ice cream at the kid table while talking about burps and farts with the other boys, went bowling with his new bowling set, played hide and seek with ashton and trent and just had a great time.
he got tons of great stuff, some of which included a webkinz puppy, several books, moon sand, an mp3 player which he LOVED as soon as he realized thomas music was coming out of it, and a brand new big boy bike. he hopped right on the bike and started riding around the basement right away. and it only took about 3 times of running into the cd wall before he figured out how to use the brakes.
he kept saying "this is the best birthday ever!" although i understand he says that about everything, but i still think it was up there for him.
thank you to everyone that came out to help us celebrate and for all the great presents. so far being 5 has really treated us all quite well. hayden has had a record breaking 3 days in a row of being extremely well behaved even though sleep schedules have been insane during the holidays. we wish he would have turned 5 sooner if this is how it's gonna be!

the set up: