Ethan's Birthday

We now have two teenagers in our house! On May 7th Ethan turned 13. He ended up splitting his birthday up into a few days since it fell on a school day. Actually, I think our kids like to split their birthdays up because we don't make them do jobs on their birthdays - so if they can get a weekday and a Saturday in that mix, they know it works to their advantage.

For his birthday meals he had monkey bread and sausage for breakfast, he went to Burger King for his lunch, and then had meatball subs for dinner. 

He also had his last track meet on his birthday, which was the All City Meet. He only had one race that day and it was the first race of the day. So rather than make him stick around and watch all the other races before catching the bus back to school at the end of the day and then catching the bus home, we just took him home with us and let him have the day off.

Ethan is still really into sports. He likes track a lot and had a good year. He ran the 1,600, 800, and 400 meter races. In all of them, he improved a lot over the course of the year. His fastest time for the mile was 6 min 37 seconds, for the 800 it was right around 3 minutes, and for the 400 I think he got around 75 seconds. I am excited to see what his times end up looking like as he hits his growth spurt and his stride lengthens out a lot. He also did the long jump and his longest one was 11 feet 1 inch.

Ethan also likes ping pong (a lot - he even looks up information about top players in the world) and basketball and any other sport he can do. Ethan is also very social. He just wants to be around people - friends, brothers, anyone. He also really likes to get opinions from others when he has to make a choice.

Ethan has a lot of talents. He can generally do well in school without much effort. He is artistic. And he just picks things up easily. He is also not afraid to try hard or new things, even if it means he will not do so well at them. But, at the same time he is competitive and wants to win (mainly against family members) and to make sure the rules of the game are followed exactly.

Here are some birthday and track pictures.