Sam

The Red Monster turned eight years old this week. I am surprised you didn't hear him crow the morning he woke up and realized he was finally, FINALLY a year older. Almost as soon as he turned 8, he wanted to know if I knew of a place where he could get "a good tattoo." Yes, that question was delivered with the utmost of sincerity and seriousness. Er. Uh. Hhmm. Er. Wow, as a matter of fact, No I Do Not, was the answer he was given. He was pretty dejected after that.
I let him play hooky on his birthday, and he spent the day with his Pop. Apparently they spent the entire day on a tractor pulling a tree out of the ground. I am not sure what offense the tree had committed, but if you know Pop, well...we aren't surprised. Sam was beside himself with joy, and we heard the play-by-play of the root removal at least 14 times before bedtime. The only thing is that now he just can't understand why it's ok to drive a tractor, but no one will go ahead and give him his driver's license. I can't believe that, can you? The nerve of this world.
School is going...well.....it's going. Sam is really doing awesome in math, and he loves all of his teachers. Reading and spelling aren't his best subjects, but he still allows them to teach him these things. For now.
He has a B average, I think, in both of those subjects for now, but we are up and down the grade scale in those subjects, so we really have to keep a thumb on him. I'm very happy with how much his reading has improved since school started. I wouldn't dare say reading is his favorite subject. Not by a mile. No, that would be recess where the dirt is.
His homeroom class carved a pumpkin and wrote a How-To paper about the process, and he was so stinking excited that they had used a knife at school. It's the little things, I tell ya. The best school news of all is that he hasn't ripped the sleeves out of any shirts on the playground in WEEKS!
Sam's future plans change by the week, but mostly he just rattles from one day to the next about the different things he is going to invent and how the masses will benefit from these creations. His latest invention is a tube that stretches from a restaurant or store to your house, much like the bank drive-thru tube, that will send you what you want for supper. This idea was born from an incident that involved Sam having to eat something for supper that he didn't exactly want, which is odd because I have yet to find something the kid won't eat. He loves hot sauce, shrimp, BBQ, sloppy joes, baked beans, any vegetable, baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, oh--wait, I know what he won't eat. Rice. He swears he is "allergic" to rice.
If only he was allergic to dirt.