Leanna Kay

Chris woke up today with great anticipation because it’s the BEST DAY OF THE YEAR. For him. Today begins the NCAA tournaments. And mainly it’s a big deal to my competitive little boy because we have a family pool which he wins every year.

No illegal gaming going on here. We fill out the brackets and the winner gets to pick a half gallon of ice cream to share with the family. For a competition with just a dairy treat as a prize, things get brutal.

Chris will stand in front of the television yelling at the players. If his team loses, he’ll flail himself onto the ground with the kind of wailing you should only see in Greek tragedies. I guess there are important stakes at issue here when you want peanut butter chocolate chunk ice cream and you have to settle for fudge ripple.

Let the games begin.

We will be traveling next week so I won’t be blogging. Check back to see what new vacation spots have banned us from admittance.

When we initially planned the boys’ birthday slumber party for Friday, we hadn’t planned for the 15 inches of snow. When I saw the forecasts, I had visions of nine rambunctious boys snowed in at my house for days on end. I imagined myself so anxious to send them home that I trained our dog, Maria to mush and pull sleds. Only Maria doesn’t obey even the simplest of commands. Down. Come. Don’t you dare go doo doo on that plant you stupid dog. None of these register with her, so sled dog seemed out of the question.

I had one recourse. Re-schedule the party and hope the snow melted by the new date.

Having your birthday sleep-over rescheduled is the nine-year-old equivalent to Armageddon. There might not be hell’s demons sent to earth to torture the unbelievers. But postponing birthday fun for a whole week? Same thing as the demons.

To minimize the sting, I planned a little party for the five us which we named Blizzard Bash 2008. We danced. We ate on the fine china. We watched movies. We played a new DVD game I’d bought for just this purpose. We consumed enough junk food to feed a third world country for a week. In other words, we had a blast.

For a while.

Only Blizzard Bash 2008 went on for three straight days as it just kept snowing and the roads stayed slippery. By the third day, we decided to go outside and have an all out snow war. There was much laughter until Lauren got snow down her back. She started sobbing just as Chris tackled Drew. Then Drew retaliated with a snowball to Chris’s eye. Suddenly everyone was screaming or crying. The magic was gone.

The snow wasn’t. I suddenly had visions of days of school cancellations as the kids were unable to get to school. Come here, Maria. Mush…..

Happy Ninth Birthday to my “middle” child. You arrived in this world only a minute after your brother, but that minute has defined who you’ve become. Whenever anyone asks who’s older, you make it clear that even though Drew arrived on this planet 60 seconds earlier, you are a half an inch taller. And that makes all the difference.

You are my competitive child. Mostly this propels you to be the best Chris you can be. You accept nothing at half measure and work hard until you achieve your goals.

But your competitiveness has also caused you great angst. You have been known to fling yourself onto the ground after losing a round of Candyland. This loss has caused you to wail as if your failure to reach the candy kingdom has doomed you to a life of pain and misery. In the last year, we’ve been working to teach you to control your anxiety. Whenever you lose a game, I make a big deal about how this now means that you will never get into college. You’ll be living at home forever eeking out a meager existence making fries at McDonalds ALL BECAUSE YOU LOST A GAME OF BASKETBALL. This always makes you laugh.

You have such a wonderful sense of humor. Sometimes you laugh so hard it brings tears to your eyes and I can’t help but laugh with you. Last week you left me in charge of your webkins while you were in school. I decided to play a trick on you. When you came home, I met you half way down the driveway complaining what a handful Larry the leopard had been all day. He’d telephoned someone in China. He’d climbed my bookcase, emptied my trash can and jumped on my computer keyboard. I told you that I’d sat Larry in the chair and told him to wait for his daddy. You were smiling as you came into my home office, ready to give Larry a time out. When you found Larry propped up on my copy machine making photocopies of his butt, you laughed harder than I’ve ever seen. And I laughed right along with you.

You can always make me laugh, and you also seem to have no trouble making me smile. I love the way you were so concerned about me when I spiked a fever and didn’t feel like cooking dinner. I appreciated it when you ran to get me a pillow and a glass of ice water. And when Lauren was sick and I was tending to her, you didn’t complain. You went off to make dinner all by yourself.

I loved the big smile you gave me when I said I’d be the room mom for your class this year. And I love the way you’ve never failed to thank me each time I’ve come into your class for a party.

You are such a kind person. You are an intense child with a loving heart and a sensitive soul. I can only imagine what great things you will accomplish as you grow into adulthood. HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHRIS!

As you turn nine years old, I can now look at you and see less of the little boy you were and more of the man you’re becoming. We’ve had so much fun the last year. Let me touch on a few highlights.

I love the way you came running when your sister screamed that she saw a roach. I love the way you quickly volunteered to smash the annoying insect. Though I think you were partly motivated by the desire to see squished bug innards, I still appreciated that you made her screams stop. For a moment. Because of course you picked up the squished bug mess and jammed it towards your sister’s face so she’d scream again. You are definitely all boy.

You love the outdoors and come in so muddy, I can only guess you’ve been rolling in dirt. Or digging in it. This summer, you and your cousin Adam started a quest in the side yard to dig your way to middle Earth. You have yet to hit your destination, but I have the hole to show how hard you’ve tried.

I love the way your mind is always inventing. I can’t help but smile when you look at me all concerned about whether I’ll be able to wait for you to grow up so you can invent a housecleaning robot to do all my dirty work. My heart melts when you tell me the first robot will be mine and it’ll be free. When I volunteered to pay, you agreed I could pay you one dollar. But then you pondered the concept of inflation and changed your mind. It’s almost as if you calculated the rate in your head as you told me maybe a thousand might be better.

Numbers are always racing through your mind. You were so amazed at Christmas when we went to the NORAD site and watched Santa making his rounds. You were all ready this year to put away your belief in the old guy until you saw actual proof on the web. Then you ran off to calculate how many seconds Santa had to spend at each house considering the span of time and the billions of inhabitants in the world. Your mathematical mind still cannot wrap itself around the concept of Santa.

You amaze me daily at your ability to reason and your thoughtfulness toward others. Someday you will change the world and I will be smiling and cheering you on from the sidelines. Now go off and enjoy your last year in single digits. And make sure you do enough embarrassing things so I can fill up a year’s worth of blogs.

Happy Birthday to you too Chris. Your turn is next!