Baby-Ao turned 2 yesterday. We didn’t bother having a party because he’s too young to miss it. We just tried to replicate what we did for his first birthday, which was to take a family picture along with his presents and a cupcake, and sing him a trilingual birthday song.

But unlike his first birthday, oh, this year it was a real challenge to get even something as simple as that set up – he was crying and throwing a tantrum – he kept wanting to clamber onto the table, fiddle with the arrangements, he didn’t want us to hold him and sit on the sofa… We were tempted to give up altogether and just put him to bed.

Thankfully, we eventually managed to coax him and calm him down, by giving him a banana (his favourite fruit), walking him through the photo book of his first year, and singing “Baa baa black sheep” (one of his two current favourite songs, the other being “Humpty Dumpty”) and we eventually managed to get him to cooperate and sit through many timed-photo attempts (he actually enjoyed it and would say “gen! gen!” – again, again – after the camera beep went off) and a couple of renditions of the “Happy birthday” song.

And then we opened his presents:
– 2 polo-Ts, a sweatshirt, and a set of Duplo vehicles from his paternal grandparents
– A wooden train set from me
– A duo learning abacus (alphabet and counting beads) from the Boy
– A Sit & Scoot trike (which was technically supposed to be his birthday present from us, but we bought it for him in June, so felt like we needed to get “fresh” presents for his actual birthday)
– 2 Chinese music CDs, a Chinese book, and Usborne’s “My First Keyboard Book” from Auntie-T
My parents will pass us his birthday presents when we visit them later this month.

He was pretty excited by all the new stuff, new toys, and wanted to play with them all, NOW! I was really worried that we wouldn’t be able to get him to bed. First we started with the Duplo, his favourite thing, which we played with for a while, but he pottered over with curiosity when I started tinkering with the keyboard book, then he went to the learning abacus and started pointing at letters and said “B”, “A” (even if they were other letters), then tried to open the music CDs (which he thought were books), then he wanted to open the train set… I was a bit worried that he wouldn’t be able to sleep given his frenetic activity, and thought opening the train set would really get him over-stimulated right before bed time, so I suggested that we play with the train set the next day, and that we should read a book, take a bath, and go to bed now – wasn’t he tired, he must be given such an exciting day. He paused to consider my suggestion, then said: “Mmmm” and happily started his bedtime routine. I was really surprised and pleased that he was being so cooperative – a nice end to his birthday.