Graydon's TENTH Birthday!

Here is Graydon at the exact moment that he turned TEN!


Each year, it's the same. He's always asleep. He wanted us to wake him up this year so that he could be awake for the moment. We tried.

After breakfast at Denny's that day, we took the kids to play at Action Territory for the afternoon. They each had bracelets for unlimited bumper cars, laser tag, ball pit, and the vault. Plus, Grandma Debbie bought game cards for all of the arcade games. I wanted a photo of all the kids before they started playing, but didn't want to hold them back from getting started. In hindsight, I should have checked the photo that I took because the birthday boy's eyes were closed!


We didn't get too many photos from the activities, but here is Graydon doing bumper cars.


This was a neat bowling game.


This lucky birthday boy hit the jackpot...TWICE! Look at all of the tickets that he accumulated! One really nice thing about this place is that all of the tickets get loaded on their token card. That meant that we didn't have to keep track of all of those tickets and potentially lose them! They simply gave their card to the prize counter and it was all done digitally.








Later that evening was the official family party. We brought back pizza for everyone.




TEN!




Presents! This water bottle was from Bella. Graydon received a nice water bottle like this a previous year, but Bella used it and lost it. She made good on paying him back for it.








He also got some money. Between Christmas and his birthday, Graydon came home with a lot of money. He used it to purchase himself a new iPad!

Also. . . I didn't want to forget this. When we were at Action Territory, Graydon was playing a claw-like game. The prize was a $500 prepaid MasterCard. Graydon was really disappointed that he didn't win it. When Curtis saw that he was upset, he whispered to me that he wanted to play the game and try to win it for Graydon. After a few attempts, Curtis was also unsuccessful. We didn't try more than a few times because each attempt cost $1. Since Curtis was unable to win the card, he offered Graydon some of his ticket winnings to choose a prize at the end. Graydon chose an orange emoji ball that cost 400 tickets. When we arrived at my parents' house for his party, Graydon took out the ball and began playing with it. Within that first minute, the ball bounced into the fireplace. Andy retrieved it pretty quickly, but a hole had already formed and the ball deflated. We are keeping this ball though. It's a great little reminder of Curtis's generous heart towards his brother.