His voice is deep and may be headed deeper since he still squeaks. He's starting high school in the fall and is quite a bit taller than me. He's in the middle of that awkward, gawky teenager faze where it's hard to keep him in clothes that fit, hard to keep him full and hard to know what kinds of gifts to give... especially for him, since he leans toward the immature side. Where other boys his age might want phones, games, or music... my boy still wants toys. He was pretty excited about Inside Out figurines. The movie was his MAJOR fixation (and a relief from the constant Stitch cousins) when I was in Disneyland in January so I picked these up. He's more into Pokemon (again) now, but these were still a hit.
His cake was a last minute, night before project (yes, this is becoming a pattern). A late night project. As you can tell.
I had to stay up to get the cupcakes done for his party. And as long as I was making cool cupcakes for a party, I might as well make a cool cake.
This picture makes me smile. My seven children. And the best part... they're biologically possible age spacings... 16, 14, 9, 7, 5, 2 1/2 and 1. I'm glad I get to experience the large family I always wanted (and glad I do get to send half of them home).
Monkey did the cake lighting honors.
There is just something so sweet and tender in Buckets expressions... but that is truly how he is sweet, tender, gentle and loving. Whether those traits come because of, or despite, his being on the spectrum, I hope he never loses them.
As you may have guessed from the cake, Bucket's party was Pokemon themed. I had to scour the internet for ideas for Pokemon games that would appeal to teen aged boys. I think we did pretty good. And we had wrapped Pokemon cards (2 per package) and mini figures for prizes. And there was plenty of trading going on throughout the party.
The boys drew Pokemon (real or invented) while we waited for everyone to arrive. And everyone had a name tag with a Pokemon name and some star stickers. If they called someone by their real name during the party they had to give them a star. The boy with the most stars at the end got a prize.
The boys drew a Pokemon on a balloon with sharpies and we held a Pokemon tournament. I drew two circles on the ground with chalk. Two boys faced off, trying to keep their balloon in the air (we had a fan going, plus the breeze from being outside) without stepping outside the circle.
The next battle was for air-type Pokemon. We had a two strings tied between three posts, with a Styrofoam cup on each string. The boys had to move the cups from the outside post to the inside one just by blowing. It was such fun to watch I totally forgot to get a picture, but you can kind-of see the cups and string in the background of the above picture.
Then we had Pokemon billiards. I bought a package of ping-pong balls (wow, those things are hard to find! Thank goodness for family with Amazon Prime accounts.) and painted one to look like a Pokeball. I drew a large-ish circle on the ground and all the balls went inside. There was a second circle further out to keep the boys bodies back far enough. They took turns using a golf ball to try to knock the Pokeball out of the circle without knocking out any of the white ones. Being outside with a breeze definitely complicated things on this game.
The pinnacle of the whole thing was our Pokemon hunt.
I took little tiny Pokemon figures I bought online, tied strings to them and left twisted and tangled strings all over my back yard.
The boys had to follow their string over, under, around and through to get their prize.
It was a big hit. Honestly, I'd thought the boys would just kind of follow the string around, gathering it up as they went... but they turned it into some crazy form of Twister, trying to get their bodies through the spaces, turns and twists the string followed.
Then we had cupcakes, opened presents, did sparklers (fire-type Pokemon) and gave each of the boys a thing of bubbles (bubble-type Pokemon, don't you know). In case you're wondering, 14 year olds love bubbles as much as 2 year olds, but I think they go through them faster, probably due to their greater lung capacity.
And in a major, MAJOR, break through.... Bucket had a friend from school come to his party. His usual guests are kids from the ward, his best friend he's known since kindergarten (also spectrum), children of my friends and his brother. This year he also invited a new friend (younger brother of a friend of Monkey's) that he's really hit it off with (though sadly they're two years apart in school) AND I insisted he invite a couple kids from school. Specifically the son of someone I know from volunteering at the elementary school, who has talked to his mom about how cool he thinks Bucket is (he couldn't make it) and the boy from his english class. Bucket's english teacher mentioned their relationship to me early on in the school year. How, just by chance, she'd put Bucket next to this boy and they'd really hit it off, since they both like to draw, and how much it improved Bucket's behavior to sit by this other boy. AND HE CAME! I couldn't hardly believe it. Bucket never talks about "friends" at school, can't tell you the names of anyone in his classes, says he sits alone at lunch. I worry so much about him socially. So having a friend from school come was just HUGE, especially given I don't know this kid - or his parents. (Though, we looked in Monkey's yearbook to see if he was related to anyone she knew and with a little FB stalking found out that his mother is one of my sister-in-laws friends from high school. Small world.)
And since I technically said this year's Memorial Day BBQ was also to celebrate Bucket's birthday... here are a few pictures. (I always have great plans to take so many wonderful pictures of one of the few times my whole family is together... but I always get caught up in enjoying everyone and I'm lucky to get a few. That's probably a good thing, though.). Here are my niece and nephews enjoying the chickens.
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