An annual day of favorite things.

Thursday was Josiah's 3rd birthday, and I am still having a hard time believing that my baby has grown up so quickly. He is far more than I could have asked for or imagined when I dreamed of who was starting to grow in my belly nearly four years ago.

We have unintentionally fallen into a tradition of the way we celebrate this little man's birthdays. It happens to include Chickfila and Monkey Joes--the inflatable play place, which, to this day, remain two of his favorite things. This year it also included some bonuses. For example, we made Josiah's favorite breakfast--bacon and eggs.

Then, we celebrated his birthday with his preschool class. Josiah got to choose a prize out of the birthday bag, and 9 preschoolers sang "Happy Birthday" and shared chocolate chip cookies and juice boxes with him. He ate up the "special" day and told everyone, including those who already knew, "Hey, it's my birthday today."

After preschool we ate lunch at Chickfila and gave him the presents from us and Baba.

As you can imagine, he didn't eat much after he realized he got this:

We went to Monkey Joes where Josiah jumped and played all of the arcade games. He was persistent in his desire to play the "Deal or No Deal" game, and we finally caved since it was his birthday. He got to choose a case and the ticket amount in each case was between 1 and 200 tickets. We played the game all the way through, thinking he was making stellar case choices the whole time. Ends up that it didn't really matter, because he had chosen the 200 ticket case as his own!

Those tickets got him a long way in the world of "prizes." He chose some plastic safari animals and a mini slinkee.

We ate dinner and got a milkshake to cap the night, and he fell asleep satisfied with our day of celebration.