Alex Turned 9!!

Alex had his birthday this Tuesday. The kid has made it to be a nine year-old. I'm impressed. He is maturing faster than I can keep up with.

He's got this girl he is crushing on that plays with him basically every day. Annie wants to be just like them but she doesn't understand why it is okay for Brooklyn to pull his hair and tackle him but not so okay for her to do the same things. Especially since Brooklyn spends a lot of her time playing with Annie and Ashley, too.

Luckily, Alex is just so dang awesome he tolerates her trying to figure this out while she beats up on him. A year ago he was hitting back and hurting her. This year, he understands that he is bigger than her and so he just takes it until he feels the need to say something to the grown ups. It reminds me of an older lion being beat up on by the baby lion. Just taking it until he's not any more.

We had his party early so his friend who was moving could attend. I was a little unsure what we should do with his gang of 8-10 year old boys but we made it work. It was a little bit awesome, I'm afraid. Starting with the weather: We were due for nice weather but the day before his party the forecast changed to thunderstorms.

We ended up doing a lot of his party outside anyway as the weather held up perfectly until an hour after everyone left.

We played a ton of games. The first one was a game where you make a mound of flour with a bowl, put a whopper on top of it and take turns making cuts with a butter knife. Whoever makes the cut that makes it fall in has to retrieve it with their mouth.

This was a fun game until one kid inhaled so much flour he threw up a bit.

Ashley was adamant about getting a turn to fish for the whopper but once she did, she made the same mistake and took in half the powder. Oops!

Then we played upset the fruit basket. Or some modified version of it, for those of you who know this game. We had 3 kinds of fruit and a caller. The caller would yell out 1 or 2 types of fruit and those had to get up and change chairs. Whoever is left standing is the new caller. Or you can yell "Upset the fruit basket" and EVERYONE moves. It was awesome until the kid with the broken arm got bumped into a little to rough.

We put a blanket over Alex and told him to take off the last thing he put on today. He took off his socks. Wrong! So he took off his shirt. Wrong! Before it got graphic, we let another kid try it. He totally got it and whipped the blanket off as soon as we said "go". But it's a fun game. The other kids wanted a turn, too. But since the joke was already told, I don't know if they wanted anything more than to be undressing under a blanket in front of a bunch of people.

9 year old boys are strange.

We took them outside and let the kids feed Alex the leftover whipped cream from his cake "frosting".

And then Alex chased them to exact revenge.

We played murder which some of the kids were really good at and some of them couldn't understand if you paid them.

Then there was cake and always the last thing is the Silly String fight in the backyard.

All in all, it was a good party.

And we are proud of our boy who is so smart and so funny and so snarky.

We love you, Alex!