James is 11

James is 11! 

He had a birthday sleepover party with 4 boys - I picked them up from school on a Friday & they hung out & went bowling & ate pizza & opened presents & jumped on the trampoline & made ice cream sundaes & banished parents/siblings upstairs & played at the park across the street & spent the night & watched movies & listened to music. They got more sleep than I thought they might (from about midnight to 7 or 7:30am) though one boy insisted on sleeping on a chair even after I brought down another mattress for him - my 40 year old back would not have forgiven me for months or years or maybe ever after that. Another boy blew his nose and at first accidentally tried to dispose of the tissue in our silverware drawer - so I washed all of the silverware & cleaned out the drawer, which I'm sure is good practice to do periodically regardless, and I am absolutely glad that I happened to be standing in the kitchen and saw the mix-up. Ha! James got a strike at the bowling alley (wow!), but 2 hours was maybe too long for them to play. Leah had an impromptu sleepover with Aunt Holly because she was inconsolable about being left out of shenanigans. 

Leah had to ride the bus home (with Amelie) since this is the max number of non-front-seat passengers in the minivan (James is pretty salty about not being allowed in the front until his NEXT birthday). (I think they are trying to look cool in the photo. They ran around & around the playground before this.) 

Leah was still here for this part!

The pizza took longer than I thought it would to deliver, which led children to consume a lot more of the veggie and fruit trays than they might have otherwise. Ben loaded his plate up with vegetables & left a pizza-sized triangle blank spot for eventual pizza. 

James wanted to be in charge of picking all the meals on the Saturday after his birthday & so spread out the celebrating a little bit. He wanted a breakfast quesadilla from taco bell for breakfast, Chinese food for lunch, and an assortment of appetizers for supper (Sam made onion rings from scratch! plus chicken wings and bacon-wrapped dates and watermelon  and mini corndogs - those were not homemade! ). He asked for a chocolate "emo Elmo" cake, and Leah kept calling it some variation of "emu Elmo / emo emu / Elmo emu emo" He did a fair amount of the drawing/decorating/designing.  He also insisted that the "11" number candles did not count toward the 11 candles for his 11 years, which also needed to be on the cake (of course). 

He also wanted his hair dyed blue. It started out as really blue, but then turned more greenish (I guess because his hair is yellow), which thankfully he was okay with. I wonder what color it will be in 2 weeks when they do school photos. 

For presents he got: the black-and-white original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic collection, the TMNT video game (from Grandma Mary & Papaw), a sketchbook, Louisiana's Song, In Real Life, Monopoly, the expanded Exploding Kittens card game, a fidget spinner, and (per his request) "awesome bath bombs." 

Nana Jana picked him up after school one day & took him to the mall & he came back with a new book series & even more exploding kittens.