Grandpa Visits for a Birthday Party

First birthdays are for parents, to celebrate the adults who care for an infant having made it a year. Second birthdays are similar, but the baby/toddler is starting to be a person. The days have melded together for over seven-hundred in a row, and now I have a son who can look over the table-top and grab things, who loves to climb up on the our bed and fall backwards in an impressive trust-fall onto the mattress only, who can loudly shout, "DAA-DEE! HELP!" in the mornings when he wants out of crib.

My dad visited, and Cass was funny with him. It seemed to me like Homer and Grandpa, like for Cass there was Daddy and there was old-Daddy. The Boy was very warm with him, taking him by the hand back to his room to play very early in his stay.

My cousin and his wife and their eight-month-old son made the trek from Santa Monica, and they got see their Uncle Luke---my dad. Dad got see both his grandson and grand-nephew.

My mom and Auntie Peg came as wqell, as did Cass's buddies, Ari and Vera, and their folks. Even a colleague from a career ago made the trip. It was fun and at a Park. It was too windy for the bubble machine, but fun was had.

On the way to breakfast:

On the day of, and we haven't fully come to grips with purchasing Mylar balloons:

My cousin Jake, in the yellow shirt, is a few weeks older than me. We grew up on opposite coasts as kids, but lived oddly close together over the years--he and his wife lived in Hoboken when we lived in Brooklyn, and they've lived in Santa Monica as we've been here in Long Beach. It will be so cool to watch Cass and Jackson (one of our boy names) grow up together:

Somehow, my boy doesn't care for frosting:

Family portrait: