Cooper was such a good brother to Silas by being excited for Silas’s 5th birthday presents. That’s just another window into Cooper’s tender-hearted soul. But the day after Thanksgiving was Cooper’s turn to celebrate. He turned 3!

On his birthday eve, Stephen and I blew up balloons and filled his bedroom with them. In the morning, both boys loved rolling around in the balloons. We marked Cooper’s height on our growth chart. He is 3 ft. 4 in. –the exact height Silas was at 4 years old.

Since Cooper isn’t the party animal that Silas is, we thought we’d celebrate with Cooper’s best friend, Connie (aka “Tonnie” as Cooper calls her). Cooper even said to me one day, “I want you to drop me off at Tonnie’s house.” He must have been lonely for his friend.

The Goodmans treated us to a day at the Wildlife World Zoo aquariums. The zoo was surprisingly empty when we arrived at 10am, and the weather was perfect!

We spent our time in the aquariums visiting the fish, sharks, stingrays, eels, gigantic lobsters, turtles, and piranhas–just to name a few. I’d recommend the Wildlife aquarium over the Sea Life aquarium any day. To finish up our morning, we went to the sea lion show where we had a front row seat.

Back at “Tonnie’s house” Stephen grilled hamburgers and hot dogs while Connie made the rest of our lunch. I had baked a Dusty airplane cake for Cooper. After opening presents, we donned our party hats, and sang to the little 3 year old man. Cooper loved to sing with us whenever the birthday song was sung. The Coop had requested red ice cream that tasted like chocolate, so we had red velvet ice cream along with our Dusty cake.

Cooper has a few signature phrases he’s picked up. We’ll often hear him say, “No way,” “I don’t believe it,” “I can’t handle it,” “Is that cool?” He loves to tell us that he loves us. In fact, one day in the car, he was telling me that “yesterday” (that magical word that includes any time before right now) he forgot to tell me he loved me, so he wanted to be sure to get it in today. Such a sweetheart! He’ll randomly hug our good friends–just to brighten their day. He even caressed Connie’s hand once and said, “You so pretty!” Hugs and kisses are Cooper’s specialty.

The tricycle Cooper inherited from Silas is one of his favorite toys. He’ll don one or two capes and ride around in circles on the back porch. As you can tell from these birthday pictures, Cooper is also into wearing hoods.

Over the past year Cooper has been convinced that his sneakers are light-up shoes that “don’t work anymore.” Although we’ve told him that they aren’t light-up shoes at all, he remained unmoved in his assertion that they just didn’t work anymore (or recently, that they lit up only on the bottom of the sole.) For his present, Stephen took Cooper shopping for his very own pair of light-up shoes. They were even Iron Man shoes–Coop’s favorite super hero. Happy birthday, Coop!