Double Digits

Double digits

This boy is now officially 10!

On his birthday he wanted 10 candles in his breakfast and lunch so we could all sing to him and he could blow them out.

He has matured a lot this year.  The poop and fart jokes are still going strong and he loves to push EVERY SINGLE BUTTON of Norah's, but where before he could not be reasoned with, now we feel like we can reason with him and he gets it.

He has the sweetest heart - at the first swim meet our team was giving out these mini beach balls to our buddies (each swimmer has either an older or a younger buddy) so the buddies had to meet and find each other and come over for a prize.  One girl from the other team came over and wanted a beach ball.  Unfortunately we couldn't give her one because we didn't have enough for the other team.  She cried and walked away and the next thing I knew Joel was walking over and giving her his very own beach ball that he had just gotten.  He does stuff like that all the time.

He still dealt with bullies at school this year.  He even had a friend on the swim team call him fat - I overhead and had a talk with that boy and his mother. But Joel was more upset that his friend felt bad than what it did to him. It'll be interesting to see if one day his fight for injustice and his experience with bullies will end up forming him to be the best advocate for people.  Its hard to see him go through all that.

He is still way too smart for his own good.  He will always find any loophole to anything and work it so it always benefits him. His brain is always working.  He was falling asleep one night and leaned over and asked if I ever imagined a tiny little work crew inside my body screwing and nailing pieces of skin back together to heal cuts.  And when he tells stories he goes into great detail of everything. I would love to see the inner workings of his brain. This summer all his friends have said how great he would be at coming up with commercial jingles.  He comes up with some funny stuff and it gets inside your head.

On his birthday we had a swim meet.  That would never be something he would purposely choose to do on his birthday.  He was complaining when we got in the car to drive to the swim meet so I told Colin and Norah that we were going to tell Joel all the things we loved about him.  Joel was so funny - he wouldn't take something like Colin saying he made him laugh and then Norah saying he was funny since they were similar.  He wanted to hear all different things.  He would also ask us to elaborate if he didn't understand why we had said something and then he would tell us if he accepted that compliment or not.  By the end of the drive (and it was about a 40 minute drive) he was smiling and happy to get out of the car.

And I think he ended up glad we were at the swim meet that night with his friends.

And since he had to have his birthday at the swim met I bought mini cupcakes for the entire team.  We were going to sing and give them out at the halftime break (I had asked his coach when would be the best time) but the meet was running so slow so they cut the halftime break.  So I sent Joel around with his pack of friends to give them out to everyone.  The rest of the night I had people coming up saying how cute Joel was - as swimmers came out of the water he would be standing there saying "you swam great - have a cupcake"

Joel gives the best hugs, has the greatest laugh, is the champion of all unfairness in his life, and constantly brings us to our knees in prayer. The world needs more Joels and we couldn't be more grateful that God entrusted us with this sweet strong-willed boy 10 years ago.