5 years old.

It may be a week late, but Henry is 5 years old all the same. How did that happen so quickly?

5 years, to me, is the official end of my preschooler. Henry is now a kid. And his number one priority is getting out of his daily naptime. (Not likely, kid.) This year, Henry had 4 birthday cake "occasions." The first was at his Thanksgiving birthday party with Sadie. Second was this little cake on his actual birthday.

The third cake was the birthday cupcakes at school. You get to be line leader on your birthday. An extra bonus was that Henry's class had a field trip to a Christmas Tree Farm that day. Papa was the lucky one to chaperone.

There's very little footage from Henry's birthday. Mostly because he decided he wanted to go to the Huddle House for waffles for supper. He was loud and rambunctious. June screamed about everything and Georgie cried the whole time. At one point, Brandon looked at me and said "I thought this was supposed to be fun." Not likely, papa. You can almost see and hear us counting down the minutes until bedtime in this video. Especially after Henry "blows" out his candles and really turns on the charm.

After cake, Henry got to open his present. I officially declare the fifth birthday the "Lego Birthday." We now have many very cool kits that keep Henry occupied for hours at a time. He also got this really awesome circuit building kit. All of Henry's engineer uncles and neighbors are drooling over this one.

We gave the Christmas tree shot one more chance. I guess this is as good as it gets.

On Saturday, we hosted a birthday party at the local Pizza Hut. It was the best party ever, if only for the fact that I didn't have to clean the house and plan too many activities. Here's Mr. Social himself watching tv during his own party.

Everyone got a tour of the kitchen, then they got to make their own personal pan pizza. I won't go into the politics of which pizza place is best (probably not Pizza Hut), but our Pizza Hut now has a special place in my heart. The building is brand new and very nice, the two girls in charge of the tours were great with the kids, and they opened the store an hour early so we could have our party and not disrupt business or other diners. And at $3 a kid, we may never have a party anywhere else.

After the pizza, we cut the cake. Henry requested an ice cream cake. We Seiberts like our cake one way: extra ice cream- hold the cake. That's my boy.

I was pleased with how the ice cream cake turned out. The bottom layer was chocolate, topped with chocolate graham crackers, a jar of hot fudge, and a layer of birthday cake ice cream and some whipped cream. Everybody ate it, so it must have been good.

Another birthday song.

5 years must also be the year kids stop being crazy (we'll see about that). Because this was the quietest birthday party I've ever been to. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that most of the kids are in Henry's kindergarten class, so they all know how to behave around each other. We invited 23 kids and 13 showed up. The perfect sized party. Plus, we had stickers and foam ornaments to decorate, watercolor paint sheets and coloring pages. What a great bunch of kids.

The little girls were so sweet. We really liked this little girl because she was named Georgia after her Great Grandma, almost just like our Georgie.

I can't remember if this is Anna S. or Anna C. I'll have to ask Henry.

June wanted to wear something especially pretty for the party and only got a little patriotic teasing over her Soldier Day outfit.

Even June handled herself well amongst all of the 5 year olds. She was especially taken with the little pizza box her pizza came in. She carried it around for an hour, periodically removing a slice of pizza to take a bite and put it back.