Anthon turns 4

Anthon turned four years old last week. I know everybody says it, but it's hard to believe that he's getting to be such a big kiddo. And despite it being only four years, I can't remember my life without him in it.

We had a family celebration where Anthon got to choose his birthday dinner - shabu shabu. For any of you who know Anthon this shouldn't be a big surprise. More than burgers, more than pizza, more than any thing you'd think a kid would love, Anthon's favorite food is shabu shabu. If you don't know what it is, google it. He got tons of presents - including a Spiderman costume for Halloween...with built in muscles and everything.

We also had a birthday party for Anthon and some of his friends from school and church. This is the first party we've thrown for our kids. Anthon had a very specific theme to his birthday party - Spiderman...of course. Everything was Spiderman: cups, napkins, party favors everything. He even requested a Spiderman cake. Now, they don't do kids cakes in Japan like they do in the US. So any special request cake had to be made by hand. And if you can see in one of the pictures posted, Shelley made from scratch a Spiderman cake. Talk about love! And it was really cute to see how much she doted and worried about the shape of the face, the eyes, the color of the frosting, etc.

We had the party at a park locally and rented bicycles with training wheels and ordered pizza and let the kids run around how they wanted. We strung up the pinata and gave kids a go at hitting it. They were far too kind in their first go-around. But once they saw candy fall out of the burro, the hits became more and more fierce. He didn't last too much longer.

Now being four years old comes with some new responsibilities. Anthon now has a list of chores that he has to complete everyday in order to get his full allowance - 200 yen per week (about $2). This includes things like making his bed, practicing his reading, setting the dinner table, and picking up his toys at night. He no longer gets to ride in a stroller - something we instituted when we learned that #3 was coming soon. He did get a scooter for his birthday, however, which has lessened the pain somewhat. He's scootering everywhere now and in a matter of days Shelley is having to run to keep up with his quick pace to school on the scooter. On his birthday Anthon told us that he didn't feel like he was four years old...which is kind of a grown up response, and probably the first step in realizing that birthdays aren't that big a deal! But after all of the new rights and responsibilities of being four years old in the Cannon family kicked, he admitted that he felt four and liked it better than being three.