Evan

Happy birthday Evan. Yes – your birthday was back when the bluebonnets were still blooming but this is the speed of the blog.

Evan hit his stride this year. He got nerdier, taller, faster, funner and a bigger pain in the arse (no, not arsenal, Mr. Overbearing Autocorrect). This particular shot of him holding Phineas is a still from a 30 second video he made to campaign for treasurer of student government. In the final version he did not have a cat, but he did win. Last year’s Evan ran half-heartedly for student government and didn’t get anywhere. Year before last’s Evan would have never entertained the idea. Like with Model UN, the school newspaper, or basketball, I took it as a possible indicator of his interest in what is happening around him. He is growing up! But ask him to put his bowl in the dishwasher or to brush his teeth and he will engage in long torturous arguments that always end with Jo or me yell “just fucking do it”.

Still, I really like this version on Evan. A couple of weeks ago we were traveling and Evan looked up from his book to Vivian, JoEllen and myself and said “it’s interesting how evolution doesn’t equip you to deal with a non-local universe”. Bam!

Evan’s birthday celebration was in three parts. For part one he got together with friends for a few hours on a Saturday morning at Urban Air – a trampoline+ place where his age group seems to have returned for birthday celebrations. For part two on the day of his actual birthday we took him to a book store and then Musashino for dinner. Jo and I had procrastinated on his gift for too long and didn’t have anything on the day of, so I drove him to Barnes and Nobles directly after school and he picked out Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Ivo van Vulpen’s How to Find the Higgs Boson, Sam Kean’s The Violinist’s Thumb, George Musser’s Spooky Action at a Distance, and Frank Close’s Elusive: How Peter Higgs Solved the Mystery of Mass. He proudly plonked the books down on the kitchen table and read each one of their titles out to an amused Jo and Vivian. Part three of his birthday celebration happened just the other day when Vivian picked up the chess set from the arts studio at her school that she had made for him. She carefully hand-moulded each piece from clay and painted and fired the whole thing! Some specific details she pointed out to Evan are – the king (who doesn’t do much anyway) has been trimmed to size, and the colors are not white and black.

We were at a wedding a couple of weekends ago. More about that in another post. But I include a video from the wedding here to further celebrate Evan. He had been practicing Naatu Naatu – the Oscar-winning sensation from Hyderabad for PE at school and in this video you can see Vivian and him taking a crack at it. The fun he had with this is an example of the fun Evan is having with life this year.

And I end with a photo of Evan from yesterday. Vivian and he are finally done with school and are getting to relax before the travel of summer vacation starts. Evan told Vivian that he was taken aback when his friend Shaan asked what he had on his Pinterest clothes/dressing boards. He didn’t have any. So Vivian dressed Evan up in a selection of her clothes to get him started on his own Pinterest board. He liked it enough to where Vivian had to almost wrestle the clothes back from him. May be this means we’ll see him in something semi-formal that is not black and white this coming year. Happy birthday kiddo.