House painting and early celebrating

Some friends from BCS and our parents came to help us get started on our house painting. The hardest part was all of the scraping and sanding that had to be done before we could put on the primer. The house is now (after 2 days of very hard work and a lot of fun together) completely primed and the smallest side of the house is almost completely painted. We'll keep working on it and finish it at some point. It actually goes pretty quickly now that we're painting the actual color. It rained on Saturday night and Sunday, so we took a break from painting. Sunday was Theo's early birthday party! Our families were already in town, so we thought we'd celebrate a week early. Jim and Michelle and the kids and friends from here in Bellingham came to the shindig. Theo took a long morning nap and was well rested when everyone came. He, of course, didn't really get the whole present thing, but Deryck and Ashley helped him get his toys out of the bag and showed him how they work. We were given some really beautiful plants to make a birthday garden and will plant them later on this week. We want to finish that side of the house first. I don't want to get paint on newly planted plants. After the party our families went with us to Busara for Thai food. We had gone there with our parents while I was in labor (that's what we're doing in that picture where I have my hair in braids), so it was fun to go there to celebrate Theo's birthday. His actual birthday is a week from today. Here are a few pictures from the last few days.