9 years old!

How can it be this amazing kid, who is smart and funny and sweet, is nine years old already?  I truly feel blessed to be Kyle's mom, and I can hardly believe it was only 9 years ago I became a Mom.

We started out the week with a pool party for Kyle and some of his friends.  We had 7 kids here, plus a younger sister of one of his friends to play with Jillian, and it was the perfect number of kids for the pool and backyard.  They hung out in the pool and we did some swimming races (all won hands down by a good friend of Kyle's, a family friend, who swims competitively and is truly amazing for an 8 year old!).  Afterwards the kids had fun squirting water guns and having a water balloon fight.  I love this age because I only had to provide the activities and the kids just had fun amongst themselves..I bought a bunch of cheap water guns and filled a laundry basket with water balloons (I delegated the filling of water balloons to Jeff).  Kyle had so much fun with his friends over.  Having a pool and a summer birthday is pretty cool!

Today was Kyle's actual birthday.  We started out with our family tradition...measuring the birthday kid on our wall in the kitchen.  I remember on Kyle's first birthday Jeff made a mark on the kitchen wall to show Kyle's height at 1 year of age.  I have to admit I was a little peeved at first, I would never have chosen such a prominent spot for a height chart.  Now 9 years and 3 kids later I love looking at it, this wall that shows our growing family.

Since Kyle is the early bird in our house, always up first, I like him to come down to something special on his birthday so I pick one gift to leave out on the table which he can open as soon as he comes downstairs.  Once everyone else was awake we opened up the rest of his gifts.  A new DSi to replace the old ds which is not working (and not worth fixing).  I found one packaged with a new game which was a good deal.  Also some new books (Percy Jackson in both english and french), lego bionicle which are his latest obsession, baseball glove and ball and some new game accessories (so we can charge the game systems in the van on our road trip!).

For his birthday dinner he chose chocolate chip pancakes with chocolate milk.  And instead of cake he wanted a giant chocolate chip cookie.  Hmmm, bit of a chocolate obsession...he's more and more like me every day!

Happy Birthday Kyle!