A Birthday For the Boys

Today is Vince's birthday. I'm quite certain what he would have enjoyed most today would have been a hike up in the mountains, browsing through REI, eating some good Mexican food or pizza, taking at least a 3 hour nap, followed by another 2 hour nap, and then maybe just sitting down and playing on his computer for a bit. Instead, being the loving father that he is, he chose to do all kid-friendly activities to make his birthday as fun as possible for the boys... great dad! So, after breakfast, we packed a picnic lunch, loaded up in the van, and headed about an hour south to the Denver Zoo.

Today was a special day at the zoo, so they had all sorts of exhibits and things for the kids to do. The boys got to color stripes on their very own tigers.

There were all sorts of animal pelts to touch. Ezra and Asher got to touch a giraffe pelt, and also learned that a giraffe tongue is as long as Ezra's arm.
They learned that a polar bear's foot is bigger than Asher's head.
Solomon spent most of the time asleep... but I wanted to include him in our family outing pictures, so here he is.
Obed and daddy in one of the tropical exhibits.

This tropical exhibit had mist machines that kicked on and off to make it humid... Ezra and Asher loved the mist.

We had a picnic next to the sea lions, or...

as Asher called them... "sea camels."

Then it was home to celebrate Vince's birthday. Every year, I make a new cheesecake for Vince for his birthday. This year it was a white chocolate lemon cheesecake with a shortbread crust. It's one for the recipe box for sure!

Asher wore his party hat for all of dinner.
Then it was time to play super heroes. Last week I let each of the boys pick out whatever material they wanted in order to make a super-hero cape. Ezra picked out Spiderman. Asher picked out race cars. Obed picked out Lightening McQueen. Then, when we were getting cards for daddy for his birthday, the boys decided daddy needed a super-hero cape in order to play super-heroes with them. After much discussion, the boys all agreed that daddy needed a super-hero cape with balls on it, so they settled on basketballs. And his super-hero name, as dubbed by the boys? Well, Captain Balls of course (no comment) because of the basketballs. His super-hero job? Well, he gathers all sorts of balls for little boys and girls to play with - basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, boccie balls - you name it, it's Captain Ball's job.

Obed tires easily of super-heroes, so tonight, Warnie decided to be Captain McQueen.