0, 5, 9, 10 - or Happy Birthday Boyness

0, 5, 9, and 10 are the ages of my children, now that Boyness has turned nine.

Nine suddenly feels pretty old. He was still kind of stuck in little-kid land, at least in my head, until the moment I said "YAY, you're NINE!" and then stood in my living room all thunderstruck like a complete idiot as I realized that my boy was NINE.

He's learned to milk the birthday machine, at least a little (next year's revision will be to invite more friends, he says, although I'm not sure I agree with that one). "We can have a family party when daddy is off the day before my birthday, and then we'll have my friends come have a real party on my real birthday, and then I'll go to Nana's house and have my birthday sleepover the day after."

Luckily the family party consisted of hot dogs and rootbeer floats.

For his and-friends party, he wanted balloons. Many, many balloons. I HATE balloons - not so much the actual fact of them, not blowing them up, not even them popping, what I hate is the kids fighting with them and the fact that there are balloons in the house for a month after any given birthday; and aside from the fact that I would experience a wash of pure balloon-hatred every time I saw one, we plan to have two more parties here this month. So we compromised. I contained all the balloons on strands, and the kids took turns throwing a dart at them until there was not a single balloony survivor floating around waiting to start a fight:



When Boyness turned 5 I wrote: "In a conversation containing 1000 words, 449 of those will be "Star Wars,"" and this is still essentially true if you add the word "lego" immediately before "Star Wars." Given that fact, it's no real surprise that he liked his birthday presents so much:





And just because I can't let a whole post go without some Chubble...last night as we were cleaning up, BittyPrincess left a bowl of extra frosting a little too close, and this is what happened: