NINE-ty to Nothing - A Birthday Blog

Here we are at nine years old.  The last year of single digit age! 50% into the legally mandated period of parental responsibility! The end of Tennessee booster seats! And sure, while most of 2020 has been a complete dumpster fire, there are still plenty of things to look back on and smile about.

    1) Water Adventures! Back in the fall he went on his first canoe trip and this summer he went on his first kayak trip.  He definitely likes it as much as hiking, but honestly, who wouldn’t like it when you don’t have to paddle?

    2) I am now a driving DJ! If we are in the truck for more than five minutes, he will usually make a song request. The artist vary widely, but right now his favorite band is Metallica. That’s all him, zero encouragement from me. He just heard it on one of my Pandora stations one day and decided he liked it.  So for some songs I am now an expert at doing parental edits with the volume knob. 

3) He loves some YouTube! He can watch YouTube channels on video game walkthroughs for hours. I don’t really understand them but when I was his age I would look at the same 30 pages of the most recent Nintendo Power every single day for a month.

The YouTube influence is powerful. One day he took a box of cereal out of the pantry and said “Today, I am going to unbox these Coco Puffs.” 

4)  Pandemic Follies! Oh yeah, what else happened this year?  Wasn’t there something where the whole world ended and we stayed inside for a couple of months and cooked 3 meals a day and rationed toilet paper? Almost slipped my mind, but usually I would put something here about sports, but soccer was canceled after one game and city baseball never happened. What all kinds of activities did we do in the spring?

- Walking around and around and around and around Union, campus and trails – Because all the parks were closed, these were also great opportunities to talk about the difference between public and private land.

-Wandering around parking lots looking for interesting cars. Our greatest find of the pandemic was a Honda Del Sol in really good condition.

-Using the hill at Union to launch kites, gliders, and remote aircraft – It really is a great place for experimental flight, like the Kitty Hawk/Kill Devil Hills of West TN. One time we got a kite all the way the end of the 300 foot string. I was only slightly concerned about causing a 20 car pile up on the 45 Bypass if the wind died.

 5)  Him still a genius!!! For a kid that doesn’t “like math”, he sure loves to talk about numbers. He can add and subtract years and dates super quickly in his head. When we are watching TV and there is a year mentioned, he will state some random fact about how it happened ____ years before my grandfather was drafted for WWII and ___ years after the Alamo. And of course I need to use my phone calculator to check him but he is always right!