I am the mother of an 11 year-old

A lot has happened in the past few weeks, so I never got around to posting about J's birthday. I went a little overboard in letting him have both a "ropes course" in the woods and a sleep-over. But I don't regret it.

This is the first time in 11 years he's had more than two friends around for his birthday (as school gets out at the end of May in the US. Here, we only had to have the party one week early).

In honor of his 11th year, let me introduce my oldest boy...

Here he is with a boy from his class who came to the birthday party. Unfortunately there are very few decent pictures of the ropes course they climbed on, because the camera was acting up. Just imagine a lot of boys high up in trees (with proper safety gear).


He got the first part of the cake at his party. He got the second half with family on the actual day of his birthday.


We got him a swiss army knife to replace the one he'd lost. But the small, square packaging was so obvious, I decided to hide it within a larger box. Then I decided to make it more fun, by wrapping it again. So he got to unwrap three times before he got to the actual gift.


You can see here how much he loved it. (The other thing in his hand is a gift card to iTunes from his grandparents).


The boy has been stealing my paperclips to make lock picks. (He requested a set of professional lock picks for his birthday because "these aren't sturdy enough.") Like I need to support his kleptocratic habits. I finally confiscated them all when he started to teach the younger boys how to do it.

Where ever we go, he finds the highest thing around to climb on. (That's E behind him crying because he can't get up). We have a rule in our family - if you can't get there yourself, it's too high. J can apparently go anywhere.

When we went to Versailles to see the fountains, it was a beautiful warm day. The boys got quickly bored with history and art, and started messing around instead. J was so good that day, letting the littler boys climb all over him.

He managed to carry all of them at least once, and here got two at once. This was the most fun for me - watching him loving his brothers.

Where did the year go? How did he get so big? And capable.