Birthday!

So the baby is four. Birthdays aren't quite the same when you can't run to the store and get a Betty Crocker devil's food cake mix and a tub o' frosting with rainbow chips, but we managed. I had to buy a springform pan and puzzle through a cake mix with instructions in Dutch that included adding 2/3 -- yes, 2/3 -- of a beaten egg to the mix. I was sufficiently confounded by that instruction that I decided I'd misunderstood something and would have to head to Babelfish to try to translate the instructions. After entering the step in question and asking it to translate, I realized I'd be on my own when the translation engine returned the following:

Rudder butter the egg beaten in a seizure bowl gentle and joint the mix and 2/3 of.

(Seriously. I just copied and pasted that line. Would someone please work on translation technology?) So what else to do? I whipped out my rudder, seized the bowl, and gently jointed. An hour later, we had something approximating a cake which, when covered in whipped cream, satisfied the birthday boy. We didn't have birthday candles, so we had to light four tea lights and set them around the cake, an arrangement which I'm sure made it look to any passersby as if we were about to engage in some Wiccan ceremony... an effect certainly not mitigated by the fact that it is Halloween, after all. That's probably why we got the only two trick-or-treaters in the Netherlands at our door tonight after seeing no mention of Halloween since we've been here. We had no candy, so we tossed them a couple of muesli bars. They seemed reasonably satisfied, but we'll have to see if our door is covered with eggs in the morning.

But I digress. Again, thank god for four-year-olds who have little consciousness of propriety; Dylan didn't care if his weird cake and candles hearkened to ancient pagan rituals (oh wait, they all do...digressing again), he just loved blowing out the candles. He spent half of "Happy Birthday" looking shocked that we were singing to him and the other half poised to blow.

He'd opened most of his presents earlier today (thanks a million to those of you who sent stuff -- he loves the Thomas tent and his stuffed dinos, and A. loved her presents, too!), but last of all we let him open the aptly named "Thomas Giant Set" that Grandma Barbara and Grandpa Bill gave us to carry over here. Then we spent two hours putting it together. Then D. played with it so intently for so long that he forgot all else with the world. Here's our last video of the evening, taken after he had been playing with trains for well over an hour...



Ah, the birthday accident. No fourth birthday is complete without it.

With birthday celebrations out of the way, D. is cleared for his first day of Montessori school tomorrow. Kids here start public school right after their fourth birthdays, so we're off to catch some Dutch germs right after we pack the obligatory cheese sandwich that comprises lunch for every man, woman, and child over age 2 in this country. As one of the myriad expat guides tossed at us said, put more than one slice of lunchmeat (much less lettuce or tomato) on your cheese sandwich at your peril, as your coworkers will look on in horrified fascination at your grotesquely overwrought lunchtime indulgence. We can't have horrified four-year-old coworkers, so conformity it is. Let the indoctrin-- er, assimilation begin.