The BoyChild turned seven last Friday.

I can’t remember when, or how he went from this:

to this:

He swims now.   David reports he actually dived off the diving board.  He’s been in swimming lessons every summer since he was little, but this is the first summer he’s actually voluntarily put his head under the water or even THOUGHT about diving off the diving board. I am so proud of him.

He’s made so much progress since the first of the year.

He reads like a fiend; last night I asked him how to get the Nintendos to let us both play the same game at the same time.  He got the re-structions out and read through them aloud to me and then to himself to figure it out.

I don’t know what conclusion he came to.  I think he got distracted by something else he learned he could do in the re-structions.

Last week he went to a sports camp.  They taught him the seven year old basics of vollyball, basketball, tennis and swimming.  Tennis seems to be his favorite and he told me I needed to take tennis lessons so we could play together.  I just might!

His melt downs are less frequent and his regrouping doesn’t seem to take as long.  This is a vast improvement.

We still watch what he eats though we pretty much let him eat most things.  When he starts breaking out in a rash, we try to figure out what he’s eating too much of and cut back on it.  It’s an in exact science but seems to be working.

The BoyChild and I took a trip on the train.  A short trip –  a little more than an hour.  He was most excited that they had electrical outlets to plug in the small fan he decided he “needed” in his bag.  He was most disappointed that they didn’t have Wi-Fi.  It was a successful trip and I hope he’s old enough to remember it fondly when he’s older.

This is also the summer of the movies.  We’ve seen Up!, Star Trek, Monsters vs. Aliens, Night at the Museum and of course the grossly inappropriate Year one.  Transformers comes out this week.  And there are always several more he wants to see coming out each week.

We celebrated his birthday at the local health club with 10 or 12 kids and their families from his school.  We over estimated how much people would want to drink water, soft drinks, beer and wine but we underestimated how much pizza all those people could eat.   Instead of having everyone bring him a gift, we had everyone bring a gender neutral gift and everyone got to go home with a gift.  They did that at a party we went to last spring and he liked it so much he decided he wanted to do that at his party.  I was touched by his generosity.  He also gave away the Presidential dollars to all his party guests as they left.  He got some somewhere and wanted everyone to have one.

I took my camera but typically forgot to take any pictures.

It was his first birthday party.  I thought it was a resounding success.  And since we didn’t have to clean up our house, it was a big score for me.

He has turned into a four foot fifty pound boy.  Not a baby or a toddler or whatever is between two and five.  He’s all boy.  But he will always be my baby.