As this Summer season is quickly coming to an end, I thought it might be fun to do a Throwback Thursday to the end of Summer 2017 when we bought Nathan his first bike. 

Happy eighth birthday, little dude. Your momma and I love you so much and are so proud of the kid you’re growing up to be. 

As Nathan turns eight years old in two days, I thought it appropriate to TBT back a few years to one of the first birthdays where he truly enjoyed the celebration and made it all about himself. His third.

For the most part, I've held things together emotionally during this whole pandemic. I've kept it together because I'm the one at home with Nathan a majority of the time because Katie does not have the option to work from home like I do. So I try to keep a strong front while I'm with him. 

Man, I’m really terrible at keeping up with these COVID Diary posts, aren't I? My goal was to get through 19 of them, for obvious reasons. At the rate things are going, I may still make that goal... even at a post every two months. Ugh. 

Nathan is a YouTube junkie. How he discovered it, I'm not sure. But he's there and he's really good at navigating around and finding something to watch.

Kids can be such little assholes.

I know I said that Nathan was doing really great with riding a bike. He is! Truly! But everyone can have a bad day, right?

Why, yes! Yes he can! (He changed the jelly beans into lollipops.)

Can one young boy change the world by planting a bag of jelly beans in the ground?

Nathan tore through the rest of his LEGO Batman Scuttler build like it was going out of style. He actually finished this on Monday and has since been playing the LEGO DC Super Villains game on the Switch, but that’s another story for another day.

We’ve begun a Shelter-at-Home project. No, not home renovation. We finally finished that damn bathroom today so I hope to be reno project free for a while. 

Seven years and two days ago, I snapped what remains one of my all-time favorite photos of Nathan. And it was purely by accident, too, that I took it. 

Given Nathan's recently developed love of Harry Potter, it's only right that today's On This Day photo in Facebook for us is...

Nathan’s been editing his Spotify playlist a bit lately. Removing some old songs he doesn’t want to hear anymore, adding some new ones, reordering a little.

At Nathan’s bus stop this morning, a little girl who lives across the street and is a year younger than Nathan was showing me her little horse doll. Y’see, she brings a different toy or stuffed animal to the stop each morning to show me and then her mom takes it home. 

The other day, I opened the mailbox to find a catalog from our local toy store, Learning Express Toys. I was pretty excited to see it as, if it's not a catalog in our mailbox, it's a bill, spam, or other junk. So, yeah, I was happy to have something fun like that. I also knew Nathan would be excited to see this catalog. 

For Christmas this past year, I asked for a Hartford Whalers hat. I've been a Whalers fan for much of my life. They are the very first professional sports team I ever truly loved. I cried when they moved to Carolina and ceased to exist.

You know you’ve got an easygoing kid when this convo happens...

So what was Nathan’s big deal Christmas gift this year? A Nintendo Switch. Yeah, we finally are letting Nathan move into the modern era of gaming. 

Nathan called me out today. In grand fashion. 

I think English is an absolutely ridiculous language. Nonsensical rules, multiple ways to spell effectively the same word, indecisiveness on punctuation... and so much more wrong with it.

And then, for every disappointment that Nathan throws at me, he counters with a gem. 

I’m gonna put it out there right now, I really love the Lil Nas X song “Old Town Road.” Both the original and the remix.

I’ve always loved the attitude that Nathan us on full display in this photo from three years ago today wearing the wig that would become part of his Halloween costume later in the month.

To help celebrate one of his cousin’s birthdays today, Nathan went ice skating for the first time. It was, um, interesting. 

Damn, son. 

He’s seven! Freaking seven! How in the heck did that happen??

Yes, this conversation actually happened between Nathan and me...

"Daddy, I want to make my own rocket boots."

I was picking up some groceries on my way home when Katie called me and said, “Your son loves The Cure.”

For some weird reason, Nathan has become an art junkie in the last month. He’s always participated in art projects in the past that are assigned to him. But now he’s doing it on his own in lieu of playing with toys. 

Today, a month and a day ahead of the actual date, we held Nathan’s seventh birthday party. All three of us got to creative with the theme Nathan chose and everyone had a great time. 

Okay, it’s not a very far Throwback — more like a bit of a Tossback — as these photos are only from last Thursday and a family trip we took to Medieval Times in Schaumburg, IL. 

Foodstagrammer - (noun) A person who compulsively posts pictures of their food to Instagram. 

I learned something interesting from Nathan today... The Beatles, at least according to him, are not a rock ‘n’ roll band. Nope, not rock at all.