Much has happened in the month since we last posted, but by far the most significant happening was William’s long-awaited fifth birthday. We haven’t processed the pictures from the grand occasion yet—there are some in the works—but he is already asking when his next birthday will be, so it seems safe to conclude that he had a good time.

As you know if you’ve been following our birthday updates over the years, one of our longstanding traditions has been that the birthday boy or girl gets to have dinner (with the family, of course, though I think the older kids would prefer otherwise) at a restaurant of his or her choosing. In recent years, this ritual has proven to be be a bit costly, as both Julia and Joe have settled on Benihana as their favorite place to celebrate. William, thankfully, took it easy on our schedule and our budget by going a different direction entirely: Burger King. We went on Saturday night instead of his actual birthday to eliminate the time constraints of a school night, and we were joined there by Kai, one of William’s oldest friends, and his family.

Although William received a great many things for his birthday—as often seems to be the case on these occasions, you don’t realize quite how many gifts you’ve acquired until you actually gather them in one place to wrap them—perhaps the most exciting to me was one we bought secondhand: a bicycle. It’s Avengers-themed, which seems only appropriate given William’s love of superheroes, and it was an immediate hit when we showed it to him on Sunday. With luck, we’ll be able to wean him off the training wheels in the next year or so.

In other William news, we received his first school picture from Booksin, and although it’s perhaps not the best picture he’s ever taken, it does capture his personality reasonably well. It can be viewed in full size and in context with his preschool portraits on his school pictures page.

Finally, though we don’t have a full set of pictures to present today, we do have something slightly different. It happens to be our eighteenth anniversary, and I’ve uploaded the video my Uncle Jack recorded at our wedding and reception. The fortuitous timing is actually a bit of a coincidence: I’ve been working on getting this footage into the computer and online for the last couple months, but the date provided a bit of extra motivation to knock it out this weekend.

The quality of the video isn’t great—it was originally VHS, after all—but I’m glad it worked at all, given the age of the media. The result is probably about as good as you can expect, absent a willingness to spend couple hundred dollars on a time base corrector on top of the money we already spent on a VCR (ours stopped working years ago) and a video capture device. Now that we have a digital copy, we no longer have to worry about the tapes crumbling into dust; and should the impulse ever strike us to relive our interminable first dance, we can do so effortlessly.