This past weekend, we celebrated David's 8th birthday. It is so hard to believe that Matt and I have been at this parenting thing for EIGHT whole years... I think we may be starting to get the hang of it.
So what can I say about David at 8 - he is a brilliant, ridiculously smart, loving and kind young man. He is very focused on school work and pushes himself to do well. He continues to soak up information like a sponge and loves to read. His current favorite hobbies include reading (so much so that the school had to tell him that he couldn't read on the playground during recess), playing video games (when he gets screen time on the weekends), making paper airplanes or other origami items, Nerf guns - kid loves some Nerf guns, building Legos and just being outside. He plays baseball, flag football and tennis and is still amazing on the monkey bars. He is a very good hitter in baseball - often scoring home runs in his machine pitch games. It is very rewarding to be David's parents, but also very challenging. He questions everything and often struggles with social interactions. He likes things to be his way and gets bored easy.. especially with age appropriate games. He likes to make up the rules, to be in control and is incredibly hard on himself. Everything is a competition.. everything. We are really lucky to have school a good partner in his education. St. Mark's has been an amazing environment for him to grow, learn and make friends. We love the teachers and the community and are so grateful that he continues to love school and learning so much. I also love that the school teaches cursive, music, drama, and art. I turned on the classical music station on Pandora the other night when we were setting the table for dinner and David started naming the composer and name of the selection that was playing. I had to open the app to confirm he was right. Pretty cool for a second grader.
St. Mark's has a tradition of having group birthday parties. The 34 second graders are divided into groups of 4 (by season) and we hold one big giant birthday party for each group. David is in the Fall Birthday Group and we had the Fall Birthday Party on October 6th at Dave and Busters (or as Henry calls it - Ghostbusters). When we started at St. Mark's, this sounded way too cultish for me... no individual birthday party, what? I now understand that this is pure brilliance. Rather than going to 34 birthday parties (because if you invite one kid, you have to invite everyone), we go to 4 total. And instead of buying 33 birthday gifts, we buy 8 total. Each kid brings 2 gifts to each party and those gifts are divided among the birthday boys. So David got 8 gifts - which is more than enough (not sure how . And, because you split the cost of the party with 8 other families, it comes out much cheaper than hosting an individual party.
Here are the pictures from the Fall Birthday Party:
St. Mark's was out of school on Friday - David's actual birthday, so Matt and I took off work and got to spend the entire day with him. Even better - Hayley came into town on Thursday night .. so we got to spend the weekend with her as well. First up on Friday - annual family pictures. Sarah Dorn, who has done our photos since David was born, came down and met us in the Prather Park in HP. It would have been perfect had it not been 90 degrees outside... and 175% humidity. In Christmas sweaters, that is HOT. But we survived and the pictures are great... but you will have to wait until the Holiday cards go out to see them!
We then took David and a few friends to Dave and Busters, then to Little Ninjas and then to pizza. David then went for a sleepover at a friends house. It was a big day!
After that - we had a weekend of sports! Henry had a soccer game on Saturday, we watched the Texas/OU game at the house (look how good Matt looks sitting in my burnt orange chair) and then took everyone to Hibachi for dinner (not the best experience because everyone was tired, it took forever and our chef sucked). Sunday brought brunch, flag football and two baseballs games. I would love to complain about how busy we are.. but truthfully, it is so much fun. I love this stage with the boys and, after almost 10 years of marriage, I couldn't imagine Matt and I being any happier. Very good times...
David made friends at brunch and they were teaching him rugby...
David's first time playing catcher
In Henry news- look at these ridiculous cute school photos...
One more note - last weekend, I had a lot of time on Sunday to mess around in the kitchen and look what I made-- souffles and creme brulee. Not too bad for the first time ... even the kids liked the souffles!
