A birthday letter to Will

Legos!  Pre-dawn!  Sibling excitement!  

 Dear Will:  Today is your 9th birthday, as I reminded you several times today.  You wanted to wait to truly celebrate until lunchtime since that's when you were born, but it was perfectly fine to open presents pre-7:00 a.m. because, of course it was.  Instead of a birthday party this year, you opted for another day of skiing and you invited a friend and his mom to come along.  More pictures and stories about our skiing day later!  For your birthday this year, Reina picked out some Broncos legos, Daddy found you some new ski points and a shirt, I searched for more sports socks and lucked out with some Star Wars socks too and your big present, the Millennium Falcon Lego extravaganza was a joint present from us and Grandma and Pop-Pop.

The Millennium Falcon and a tired Dad behind the box.  

 Oh Will, I can't believe you are nine.  The last almost-decade has flown by.  Sometimes I wish I could go back in time and just spend a few hours with toddler Will.  But then I remember the diapers and maybe it's alright to back in the future.  Will, you are a delightful kid.  I love watching your enthusiasm for sports, both the kind you play and the games we watch together.  You are turning into a sports analytics nut and you ask me questions like "who was the quarterback of the San Francisco 49'ers in 1996?" and I don't know.  We google lots of sports questions.  Your list of favorite teams is long and slightly weird; Denver Broncos, Wyoming Cowboys, Minnesota Gophers, Minnesota Vikings, Golden State Warriors, Colorado Rockies, Oregon Ducks, and whoever else happens to be playing at the moment.

We also love watching you play sports.  You just finished basketball and you have soccer and baseball right around the corner.  You are already talking about football in the fall.  You have a lot of enthusiasm and you are a great team player.  In basketball this year, I had to pay you to shoot the ball because you were worried about being a ball hog.  Shoot the dang ball, kid!  You have a good shot!

Will, you are learning so much in school.  You read like crazy and write stories about Willy the Walking Waffle.  You have some good friends at school and your teachers tell us that you are kind to everyone.  What a good thing to know.  You are a good big brother and if I act like I'm not paying too much attention, I can catch you playing with your little sister and giggling like crazy.  Your little cousin thinks you are pretty cool and she just might have you wrapped around her finger.

You still love Legos and they still litter your room.  You are saving up your allowance and birthday money to buy your own video game thingamabob.  You are working your way through the Harry Potter books and you love Star Wars and a bunch of other movies that involve battles, heros, villains and did I mention battles?

Obligatory photo of Coco and a ribbon.  The weird pink thing is her tongue.  

Happy birthday Bobo.  May 9 bring you lots of fun and adventures, appropriate amounts of screen time and more Legos than you know what to do with.

Notice the big piece of cake cut out of the side?  The dogs sampled the frosting before we could cut into it.  Happy birthday Will!  

March hodgepodge

It's been another busy month at the Pauley household. I probably don't even need to start posts with that sentence anymore, it's just a given and evident by my sporadic posting.

Will caught a bad virus last weekend and spent a few days on the couch watching basketball tournaments.  The night before he got sick, he was complaining about his body hurting and a few warning bells went off in my head but he didn't have a fever the next morning so off to school he went.  The school nurse called me at 1:00 to say that he had a headache and wanted to know if he could have some tylenol.  I said 'no problem.' Forty-five minutes later she called back to tell me that he had a fever of 101 and someone needed to come get him.  That night, I took Will to our local urgent care to make sure he didn't have influenza.  Will fought the influenza test for a good 5 minutes and then the nurse told us that the doctor wanted to run a strep test.  Ten minutes later, she got a successful swab of Will's throat.  Luckily both tests came back negative and Will recovered with popsicles and juice boxes.  Will getting the strep test reminded me of the 5 yr-old Will getting his kindergarten vaccinations and the 4 nurses plus me that were needed to hold him down.  This time we didn't try to hold him down, we just (tried to) reason with him to get the test done.  He argued with me,argued with the nurse, asked for alternative methods for swabbing his throat (I told him he could grow up and become a doctor and invent a new way to test for strep), refused to open his mouth, begged to go back home (that one was tough), cried and finally relented.  In the car ride home, he told me that he'd been "kind of a jerk" to the nurse and he should've apologized.

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The whole family is participating in an NCAA bracket challenge and we all have our own brackets. Will has watched enough college basketball in the last few weeks that he has strong opinions about who's going to win and lose.  I'm a sucker for the old favorites.  Glenn knows just enough to be dangerous. This year, I let Reina pick her own teams and I wish I could've recorded the conversation.  We went through each game and sometimes she'd know one of the teams and pick that way.  A few times she asked about the mascots and made her choice that way (Jackrabbits vs. Terrapins?  Jackrabbits all the way.)

Me:  Reina, this team is called the Providence Friars.
R:  What's a friar?
Me:  It's kind of like a pastor.  Someone who works in a church.
R:  Well I like our pastor so I pick Providence.

Then we came to Butler and Reina startled giggling and chose them obviously because they have the word 'but' in their name.  Needless to say, she has them going to the championship and losing to Oregon.  Go Butler!

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We have some pre-Spring Break squirrely-ness going on right now and nighttime behavior hasn't been the easiest lately.  Reina handed me a note tonight and explained that she wrote down some of our family rules to help everyone remember:

Are home ruls
be nice no bad
words or
butt talk
and lisen
to mom
and dad
or no fiting.

She made a word search for the Tooth Fairy

Reina lost her seventh tooth on Friday at school. I only know it's her seventh because she told me.  She's been keeping track.  This tooth came out in a particularly crunchy but delicious apple.  The tooth made it home safely and Reina spent a chunk of Friday night working on a project which will play an important role in this story.

So fast forward a few hours to Friday right before bedtime.  Glenn is goose hunting for the weekend so Reina jumps at the opportunity to sleep right next to Mom.  She puts the tooth under her pillow along with a note to the Tooth Fairy (TF for expediency's sake.)  She also leaves a pen for the TF to use which should have alarmed me but didn't.  Last time, she asked TF a few questions in the card, oh isn't that cute, etc. etc.

I stay up way too late watching chic flicks and finally go to sleep with a niggling feeling in the back of mind that I'm forgetting something.  Fast forward a few short hours and Reina is waking me up at 5:50 to announce that she's going to see if the TF visited.  Uh.  Oh.  I quickly point out that since it's still dark out, perhaps we should give the TF a little more time and hey since you are up, why don't you go downstairs and watch cartoons?  Keep in mind, this kid does not see this side of 6:00 a.m. on any other day besides a SATURDAY. Oh the irony.

She skips downstairs, I stumble out of bed, grab a handful of change off of Glenn's dresser and stuff it under the pillow.  Grab the tooth and the card and the pen and read the note "Dear TF, do you ever use baby tooth fairies for your work, circle yes or no...."  I flip the card over and notice that she's put together a GAME for the TF, a word search to be exact.  Knowing that the clock is ticking and she could come bouncing back up the steps at any minute, I scramble to complete the word search (cat, bog probably should be dog working on the b's and d's, tooth (OBVIOUSLY) and love (awww).  The word search is actually a little tricky at 6:00 a.m.  Maybe I was tired or maybe she's the next Will Shortz of word searches.  I finish it, jam it back under the pillow and jump back into bad.  Sure enough, about five minutes later she's back to check under the pillow.  Yah for $2 in quarters and a completed word search and yes the TF does use baby tooth fairies (maybe should have thought that one through a little more) and the rest of the Saturday continued with far less drama but still not enough sleep.

This kid.