fritz turns two

Today is my sweet Frederick's second birthday. I love this little nugget of boy. It kind of breaks my heart that he's so old now. He has really grown up so much in the last two months. He's no longer a baby and is a full blown toddler. I love his friendly personality and he is such a little lover. He is crazy about William and the best bribe for him is "if you come right now, we can go see William!" Seeing Will is like candy for him! I love it. He still sucks his thumb and twirls his hair like crazy. I'm hoping he'll just outgrow it!

On Saturday, we threw him a small birthday party with my family who live close by. I really did try not to go overboard with decorations or anything, and I think I kept to my goal pretty well. It still turned out nice and fun and I think the food was yummy. I made some pressed sandwiches (sun-dried tomato mozzarella for the vegetarians and pesto salami and proscuitto for the meat eaters). I also made our favorite macaroni salad and my sister made this cucumber cilantro lime salad.

We all sat on the lawn and enjoyed the last few weeks we'll have of nice weather. It starts to get pretty hot here around May (it was in the high 80s that day) so we have to soak it up while we can!

Fritz mostly roamed around the back yard and followed Poppy (my brother and sister-in-law's cute min-pin) around. Bringing her to the party was the best gift ever for Fritz. He is crazy for Poppy! I hope we can have a dog someday...

I made this strawberry cake that my beautiful friend, Aarean, posted on her blog. It was a hit and was nice and refreshing. I'm usually a chocolate and peanut butter kind of girl, but lately I've been craving fruit desserts much more than my usual chocolate! The cake has some yummy lemon in it and the whipped cream/cream cheese frosting with chunks of strawberries in it was unique and light!

lovely soaked shirt from playing in the water.

When everyone started singing to him, his face turned from joy to embarrassment to a "I'm trying to hide how much I love this" smile (as seen above). It was great and he loved blowing out the candles by himself!

Poppy also really loved getting bites of cake from Fritz and Fritz equally enjoyed her licking off his fingers. He was dying of laughter!

Then Fritz opened up a few gifts. We got him started on some wooden train tracks that I hope will be around in our family for a long time. They are expensive so we didn't get too many, but I hope we can add onto the set and they will be grandchildren toys someday!