Happy Birthday Josh!

Yesterday was Josh's 12th birthday! It blows my mind that my sweet little boy is 12! He's not such a little boy anymore, I took him shopping for shoes last month and we discovered that he has to shop in the mens section now and his shoe size is only a size and a half smaller than Shawn's! My little boy has been replaced by a big kid and he just keeps getting bigger!

Josh is an amazing kid and he just gets more amazing every day. I love to watch him grow and learn and mature, even if part of me wishes that my kids could just stay little forever. :)

We celebrated his birthday yesterday by doing his favorite things. We had Ihop for breakfast and then went bowling. Josh has been talking about bowling every since we went a couple of months ago and he's been really anxious to go back and do it again. It was even more fun the second time, I definitely think that bowling has become a new hobby for our family. We all had a really great time.

Josh also got his first real "grown up" birthday present. We bought him a Kindle. As much as I'm a total electronics junky, I don't really like a lot of electronics for kids. My kids don't have their own cellphones or Nintendo DS or Ipods or anything like that. Josh totally takes after me and loves electronic gadgets and has been asking for an Ipad and things like that for a while. An Ipad isn't going to happen, but I loved the idea of getting him his own Kindle, to encourage his love of reading and to show him that we think he's growing up and is ready for more grown up things. He was really excited about it and is already in the middle of his first Kindle book.

In honor of Josh's birthday, here are some facts about him. I try not to brag about him too much, but since it's his birthday you'll have to indulge me for a minute. :)

Josh loves school and is a straight A student. Last quarter in math he got an almost perfect score for the entire quarter. He missed one half of one point on one assignment and got 100% on everything else. He works really hard and I admire that about him. When he finishes his assignments in Math his teacher sometimes lets him tutor the ESL kids who don't speak much English. Josh speaks enough Spanish to help them with their math assignments. He loves doing that.

Josh is extremely creative. He has been writing a novel for the past year that he works on in his free time. He read somewhere that the average novel has 80,000 words so that is his goal. I just asked him and he said he's up to 19,000. He's got a ways to go but I'm ridiculously proud of him to attempting it!

Josh is a red belt in taekwondo, which is three belts away from his black belt. He has worked really hard over the past two years and I'm amazed at how far he has come.

Josh is amazing with computers and loves to make really creative movies. He has hundreds of little movies that he has created over the years stored on disks. For Christmas every year one of the things he always asks for is more disks because he's always running out. Santa brought him 100 this year, so that should keep him happy for a while. :)

Josh is very compassionate and caring and kind to others. That's probably my favorite thing about him. He's always concerned when someone is sick or hurt. When I had the flu a few weeks ago he kept coming to check on me and see if he could bring me something or do something for me. I loved it when he would just come and sit on my bed and talk to me and take my mind off of being sick for a while.

I could go on forever about all the things that makes Josh special and amazing, but I'll stop there. I'm so proud of the person he is becoming and I'm amazed by him every single day. I'm lucky to be his mom. Happy birthday to my sweet boy! :)