Marisa just showed us this:

Reminded me of this, which I hadn’t seen in a while:

Awesome.

Sammy turned five on Saturday. Hard to believe, but it’s true. This year, he asked for a pool party at the YMCA, so we went with a Hawaiian theme. A bunch of his friends came, and everybody got to splash around in the water for an hour before heading over to the aerobics room for pizza and cake. A cake, I must say, that was the most amazing cake I’ve ever seen. Party Favors in Brookline, if anyone ever needs to get a great cake. We wanted to get one in the shape of a surfboard, which they offered to do, but custom shapes don’t come cheap. The more affordable option included white chocolate surfboards and crustaceans, sculpted fish and a palm tree, and the most realistic surf I’ve ever seen on cake frosting. It was a work of art.

Special thanks to Jesse for being in charge of the camera.

We took a look at photos from the past couple of Halloweens and realized that we never posted photos from that time of year in 2005, which means we also missed Doug and Lena’s wedding (and Sammy’s first trip to New York). So, without further ado, here they are. Sammy was a giraffe in 2004, and a darn cute one, if you ask me.

There’s also a picture from Sammy’s birthday, which strictly speaking was not in October, but who’s keeping track?

We just knew that last year would be the last time Sammy would want to be some sort of animal for Halloween. So, we were pretty impressed when Sammy’s choice this year was to be an astronaut. We got him a great orange jumpsuit, with plenty of flight commander patches, and a space shuttle backpack, with flames coming out of the bottom. It was pretty cool. He was the only astronaut on the block, and got plenty of compliments on it.

It was a little dicey that we’d even get to go out last night…Sammy was running a temperature in the afternoon, and we had to go pick him up early. Still, he rallied, probably at the thought of all that candy. We didn’t get a lot of kids visiting this year, and had lots of leftover candy. Happily, we had tried to buy only stuff that we don’t like, so I took the rest of it to work, and it was gone before I knew it. I’m amazed the people I work with aren’t 300 pounds.

We also made a couple of jack-o-lanterns over the weekend to get into the Halloween spirit. Sammy helped, directing Jennifer on how to draw the faces. We, of course, did all the work…and it’s harder work than we remembered carving through a thick pumpkin, then scooping out all the gunk inside. This is not the first time that the realities of parenthood have conflicted with my memories of childhood, and I suspect it won’t be the last.

EDIT: Michelle took some pictures of Sammy when she and Kevin got home on Halloween, and sent us the link to the Kodak Gallery. Enjoy!