Nine

• life

Just like that, he is in the last of the single digits.

He has three friends he considers besties (and occasionally categorises them according to favoured activities with those particular people), and finds it easy to play with other kids he has never seen before and may never see again (I suppose we can be less dramatic, we don’t live in the biggest city in the world). He does some rather scarily accurate trollfaces (do an image search, it’s not too traumatising unless you don’t like caricature). He still loves playing footy and following it (but prefers tv to going to games because that way he can wander off and play and then come back in to see how things are going). He likes to run, and run, and run. And build things with Lego. And play PS3 and PC games that declare us obviously bad parents who don’t care about their kids (because they’re MA15+ games). His favourite games are Minecraft and StarCraft. He likes playing Robot Turtle with function frogs (which is a bit above what his sister is capable of and way above what his brother is currently capable of. He wants to learn how to program and design and build robots to “help make the world a better place” and plan towns/cities so that humans can live with what they want and need without completely destroying the homes of other animals.

He gets and says a lot of things that have other people declaring his intelligence in often high-pitched voices. He completely doesn’t get other things which usually makes me realise he is not seeing a connection or relevance, and sometimes makes me wonder if he is actually that smart after all. He is also perfectly normal in our homeschooling group. He doesn’t want to go to school. I ask him every year. Sometimes a few times. Maybe he’ll enjoy it. But right now he wants to do his own thing. We’re cool with that. He’ll do all right in life.

He wanted to go to Volcano Park (it’s actually called Faulkner Park) for his birthday because he had seen it when we passed and thought it looked cool, but otherwise we had never been there. Two of his three besties were able to make it, and there were their siblings and some other friends. He declared the day a success, and wrapped up our silly season on a high.

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