10 years old!

Today we celebrated Isaac's 10th birthday. It's hard to believe that my 10 pound, 6 ounce baby boy is a decade old! He is such a delight and we're very proud of the young man he is becoming.

Isaac decided that he wanted to have pizza for dinner and a cookie cake for dessert, which were relatively easy requests to fill. My helper made the pizza dough up before she left and grated the cheese. I'd made a big batch of pizza sauce a few weeks ago and I froze it in individual servings in a ziploc, so it is ready in a flash. We just had a family dinner and then we planned to watch a movie, but our generator has been uncooperative, so we clustered around a laptop.

Nana had thoughtfully sent a pack of plates and napkins featuring Lego Star Wars, when she sent his birthday gift, which brought great delight. It's a good thing she did, because I haven't found anything like that here, even though I did go to a "party store." It was basically a small shop with 3 shelves of trinkets like you would put in a pinata. It made the Dollar Tree party aisle look like a boutique. One more thing to love about West Africa!

To really improve upon the day, we had power for almost 9 hours, which is one of the longest stretches since we arrived here. That may not seem like a big deal, but that meant that we were able to print decorations from the computer, I was able to use my hand mixer to prepare the cake and icing, and the sodas were actually cold because the fridge had been running all day!

The girls wanted to make dinner special, so they pulled out some Star Wars Legos and toys, used some stickers, printed out a few things they found on the computer and made things party-ish. It was nothing fancy, but he felt special and had a fun time.

Here's the birthday boy drinking his bottle of soda, which his sisters had re-labeled with a printed "Yoda Soda" label. The kids look forward to drinking soda here for special occassions. Here, they are called "minerals." They come in glass bottles and the price is about 40 cents per bottle. You keep the bottles in a pallet and then exchange them when they're empty.

That's a can of Pringles at the end of the table, which has been re-labeled also to look like R2-D2. Pringles is one of the only American type snack-foods that is readily available here at a relatively affordable price.

Happy Birthday Isaac!