Happy Birthday David and other weekend activities

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! 

How do I explain this....

At dinner tonight, David asked about what happen in Vegas. I was a little taken aback, no- a whole freaking lot taken aback. Although the school sent out an email on talking to your kids about mass shootings, I disregarded the e-mail, thinking surely this was for the older kids. I believed most parents, like us, would completely shield their young kids from this tragic news. They are seven, some just turning eight. Babies.... but I was wrong. At chapel, the headmaster included those healing from the tragedy in Las Vegas in his prayer. This lead to David asking his friend about what happened and him getting all sorts of detail. He was told that a retired white man took a bunch of guns to a hotel room and shot people attending a concert in Las Vegas this past weekend and then killed himself. In David's version of the story, most of the dead were children and the shooter was drunk, but everything else was pretty accurate. He knew that the guy had guns that could shoot lots of bullets at once and that 59 people were dead and hundreds more injured.  

Matt and I made eye contact and then I spoke. I did what all of us do with this parenting thing - I winged it (really wishing I had read that damn email).  I told David that I would be happy to answer his questions and talk to him about what happened, but that we should do that when Henry was not around because the subject matter was sad. I told him the most important thing to know is that he is safe and this is not something that he should worry about it. He asked why anyone would do this? He asked why guns were invented? How they killed so many people? Why did people even have guns? 

Truthfully, I can't answer his questions. I mean, in the most basic sense, even David gets the evolution of swords to bullet guns (that private school tuition is paying off), but why on earth we allow average citizens to have military weapons of mass destruction capable of killing 59 people and injuring 500 more... I don't have an answer to that. Quietly frankly, I can't figure out a reasonable answer to a lot of questions when it comes to American's obsession with guns. I don't know what to tell my child, I can't honestly tell him not to worry - because I am worried. This is not a one-time occurrence. It is not unusual for dozens of Americans to be killed by guns in a single day. Gun homicides are a common cause of death in the United States, killing about as many people as car crashes (and this is not counting van, truck, motorcycle or bus accidents). And we are not normal - other rich, industrialized countries are not experiencing this problem. Yes- there is terrorism. There are attacks like 911 in other countries and Islamic terrorism is horrific and something that needs to be addressed. But we have a much bigger home-grown problem that no one wants to talk about - Americans shooting each other. Columbine, Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Orlando, Dallas, Las Vegas. This is not an exclusive list. This is just what I can think of after having a glass of wine and crying because my precious sweet innocent child knows that 59  people were killed by a gunman for no reason. How can I possibly make him feel safe when this keeps happening over and over and over and over... 

Horrible Henry

Our perfect little Henry has broken his streak... We got this message from his teachers today:

 

 

Good morning,

Today Henry had difficulty keeping his hands to himself at the playground. He hit three friends while playing and lining up. When a teacher from the other Pre-K 2 class was speaking to him, he stuck his tongue out at her. We spoke to Henry about his choices, and instead of the birthday cookies we were having for snack he had crackers. Please feel free to call us if you have any questions.

Granny D and Weekend Fun

This past weekend, Granny D came down to see the boys and we had a BLAST. It was a great busy weekend - Friday night dinner with Granny D, Saturday morning baseball game for David, then Cub Scouts, then a Henry soccer game, followed by Henry play date with Oliver while David was with his friend Chris, and then Chris came to our house for the night and we had a family viewing of the Aladdin.. and that was just Saturday. Sunday was a little easier - I went to the St. Mark's senior auction, Granny D went with the boys to David's flag football game. After we sent Granny D back toward OKC, we enjoyed a nice family night at sushi and some late night swimming before calling it a day. This is such a fun time, but man are we tired!

Here are the pictures:

Weekends are busy...

Twice makes a trend, right?  I am committed to keeping this blog up-to-date, so thought I would start with our weekends. They are busy! Like crazy busy! On Friday, we took David to Spirit Night at St. Mark's. We absolutely love our St. Mark's community and really enjoyed hanging out with all the second grade families. It is not quite the typical Friday Night Lights that Texas is known for (which I would expect because I don't know why any intelligent, educated parent would let their kid play football with all of the research and knowledge about the effect concussions have on brain development - but that is a different topic), but still lots of fun. We didn't stay for much of the actual game, but it sounds like the Lion's brought home a victory against the Casady Cyclones.

David recently joined the cub scouts and on Saturday, he was up early and ready to sell some popcorn. We walked around the neighborhood for a bit and then he took a shift with his fellow scouts at the local Lowes. On the way to drop him off, he said he thought they could sell $1,000 worth of popcorn. These are really motivated kids, and pretty darn cute, but that sounded absurd to me. I was wrong - in a 4 hour time period, six boys managed to sell over $2K in popcorn. Seriously, these kids are hustlers.

During part of David's popcorn slinging shift (each boy only worked 2 of the 4 hours), Henry had a soccer game. He is much more interested this year than last season - when he did nothing but run off and pick grass- but he isn't quite the soccer sensation just yet. It is still early in the season!

It was so hot (seriously, Texas, summer is over.. let's be done with the hot weather), that we rested on Saturday afternoon and then went to casual dinner with friends.

Sunday morning brought bunch with friends, soccer practice for Henry, a flag football game for David and then an afternoon baseball game, followed by a play date with Evan and some swimming. Seriously, busy.. but just great.

Without further ado, the photographic evidence:

Just try to say no to this cuteness...

 

David is still kicking butt at baseball.. He hit the first pitch, so he was already running by the time I took the picture.

Poor Henry has attended so many of David's games. He is just the perfect, chill child. he packs up his toys before we leave and just hangs out and plays. As long as he has toys and can get dirty, he is totally content.

Evan came over to play after the baseball game and the boys went swimming. Henry likes to amuse the older boys with his amazing belly flops.

David brought home a big pack of work from the first month of school. I thought his story was awesome... but I am not sure he has a future in the art world.

One really nice thing about our new non live-in nanny is that Matt and I have worked out a great schedule. I get up and make the boys breakfast and get them ready and he takes them to school. I love this time with them in the mornings. And I have gotten pretty good at making a healthy happy face pancake...