blink and he's ten

This year my precious first born turned 10!!!! Raising kids can sometimes feel like a thankless job. The days are long, you spend hours on end telling your two year old not to put his hands in the toilet and your wardrobe consists of second hand t-shirts covered in throw up and poop! Yes, I said poop! (Don't judge unless you've stayed home with a baby all day...) But then it feels like you blink and 10 years have gone by. Suddenly, you are no longer changing diapers and mixing baby cereal. Instead you are having grown up conversations with your ten year old son and fighting over wardrobe choices...since when does he have an opinion!?!? Life goes by so fast. My Grandma told me it would but I never could have seen this coming!

Instead of having a big party for his 10th birthday, Ashtyn wanted to go on a shopping spree to spend his birthday money, go to the movies with his friend Seth and then have Seth over to spend the night. Easy Peasy! I can handle that! We did exactly as Ash requested. On a Friday afternoon, after Brandon got off work, Ash gathered all his birthday money and we went to Target. I think he had something like $180 to spend! We browsed each and every aisle until Ash had made all of his final choices. 

He came away with a lot of fun things! Two legos, a new Wii game, Scrabble, a book and some Pokemon cards! He's one happy boy!

We barely had time to drop Ashtyn's new toys off at home before we went to Seth's house to pick him and his parents up to go to the movies. We had already bought tickets to see Godzilla in 3D in the IMAX! This was the boys first IMAX movie and they were both so excited! We loaded up on snacks and found some seats. It was opening night and some people had gotten to the theater hours ahead (crazy!) to get the best seats so we weren't all able to sit together but we were excited anyway. Armed with our 3D glasses we settled in.

If you ever tell Ashtyn that I said this I will deny it (until he reads this blog one day and then I'll be caught red handed...) but once the movie started Ash got very nervous. He is pretty sensitive to loud noises and tends to be afraid of the unknown and so when the huge IMAX screen exploded with dark and intense movie scenes Ash got worried. The movie had only been on maybe 15 minutes when Ash started crying. No one but me knew this was going on. I leaned over and consoled him, reminding him that he already knows the story of Godzilla and that there will be no surprises. He agreed and calmed down. By halfway through the movie Ash was LOVING the IMAX experience! When the movie was over all he could do was talk about the next time we would get to go! I'm glad he hung in there!

After the movie we took Seth and headed to our house for a fun sleepover! I had transformed the dining room chalk board into a huge Happy Birthday sign and laid out a smorgasbord of Ashtyn's favorite snacks for the boys to eat late into the night. It wouldn't be a birthday party without candles and singing so, of course, we did that too!

Chocolate Hostess cupcakes, pretzels, extra cheesy goldfish (the extra being the most important part!), fruit snacks, M&M's, ring pops, sourpatch kids candy, crunchy cheetos, nacho cheese doritos, powdered chex mix and more! A sleepover dream come true!

The boys mostly played video games but they did go outside in the dark with their flashlights for a bit!

After very little sleep we gave the boys even more sugar! Donuts for breakfast! Then we sent them outside to burn some of it off. They had sword fights and played tag until they literally couldn't run anymore.

I'm happy that my little man had an opinion on what he wanted to do for his birthday and I'm even happier that it involved almost NO planning on my part...BUT I'm sad at the same time to know he's old enough to do all these things. When people use the phrase "it seems like yesterday" it is honestly the truth! I have vivid memories of Ashtyn as a baby, me sitting up at night just watching him breath and him refusing to sleep unless I was holding him walking up and down the hallway. Time flies when you're having fun and that's never more true than when you're raising your kids.