Birthday mayhem! With ammo and oceans!

Happy birthday Moomin!

We went to Buck’s and opened presents. The staff brought a free ice cream sundae and sang happy birthday while playing on very out of tune tubas and trombones. Moomin looked ecstatic at the same time as being completely embarrassed. I think embarrassed for everyone else and how silly they were!

At home we opened a couple more presents. He got a Meteor Crater t-shirt, a Spiderman blanket, a high powered magnifying glass that is real and not a toy, some science books and a giant Nerf machine gun that has glow in the dark ammo. I got him extra ammo packs for it and instead of having cake and stuff we turned out all the lights and ran around shooting each other with glow-in-the-dark nerf guns. They stick very well to computer monitors, by the way! I was at a slight disadvantage since my wheels glow in the dark when I move my chair, but on the other hand I’m a good shot! Moomin scrambled around with his giant machine gun and trash talked to Rook who was cowering in the kitchen hoarding all the ammo we fired at him!

At dinner and in the car we were talking about being 9. I said when I was 8 and 9 I thought a lot about how I was beginning to think about the fact that I was thinking. Rook said he was older when he began thinking like that. Moomin agreed and said that he thinks that he is a little bit like a cat, independent and curious, always landing on his feet (true since he was a baby) and not always liking the water. I added some memories of my house when I was 9. Rook moved to a different house when he was 9, away from his friends and school and into a 100-year old house on a hill. Moomin said he would definitely remember the time when he was in the hospital to have his appendix out (he does not remember it as horrible, but it was, and I’m glad he doesn’t remember the horrible parts) and the time this year when he bruised his head against an iron bar on the playground. I told the story of how a clock fell on my head and I had to have stitches.

Then we discussed how at this age you begin to realize (if you haven’t already) that some grownups are either not very smart, or just wrong, or both. Like my 4th grade teacher who insisted that Zeus was the Roman god of the sky. No! Arrrgh! Wrong! (I’m talking to you, Mrs. Jones from Arno Elementary circa 1979!) Moomin said that some adults think that comic books are bad for you and not as good as books. Nooooo! Take it from Moomin, who says that you can learn a lot from comic books. They can be as good as what you read in Language Arts – for example, you can learn about sarcasm, elementary particles, and Alexander the Great!

We told Moomin how he sang ALL the verses to “Spiderman” when he was in nursery school, for their graduation performance. He had forgotten! “Oh my god! I can’t believe it! It’s like the defining moment of me being a TOTAL comic book geek!”

Very true! I was so proud. As a parent there is nothing like hearing your 4 year old lisp all 8 verses about justice and radioactive blood into a microphone on stage in front of all the other parents. Oh yeah!!!! Score!!!!

Anyway, today was a nice birthday!

Next weekend is Moomin’s Ocean party. We’ll make undersea life and hang them in streamers from the ceiling. We’re going to create a life size game of “Hey, That’s My Fish!” in the driveway with blue painters’ tape hexagons, and have a jellyfish piñata filled with ping pong balls painted black which then will be the ammo for a pirate ship battle.