1.  He loves to play Empire at War.  Technically, he bought it for his father’s birthday, but he’s gotten a lot more use out of it.

2.  He’s going to dress up as Tyber Zann for Halloween.

3.  He’s writing a Star Wars comic book.  (Anyone sensing a theme here?)  This is how it starts:

[click to enlarge]

4.  He loves animals.  His favorite animal used to be the panda.  Then it was the red panda.  When he was reading the Warriors series, it was cats.  Now his favorite animal is a horse, specifically a gray Arabian.  He asked for a horse a few weeks ago.  I explained to him that it was out of the question.  Now he wants a fish.

5.  He is not a morning person.  In this he takes after his mother.

6.  He was very proud of himself for learning how to play the mini-harp.  He was excited about taking piano lessons, but five months later, that enthusiasm has evaporated completely.

7.  He and his best friend made up this song, “Evil Bunnies.”  It goes like this

Evil bunnies–oh yeah
Devilish bunnies–oh yeah
Fol-low-ers of Lu-ci-fer
Evil bunnies–oh yeah

It goes on a bit more, but I don’t remember the rest of the words.

8.  He thinks it’s hilarious to slap his own butt while dancing.  He’s correct about that.

9.  HE IS NINE YEARS OLD TODAY!!!

And now for the nostalgia portion of the program…

When I started this blog, he was three.  I started out calling him just “Bubby,” but as I wrote in May 2004:

Bubby must henceforth be called Mister Bubby, as he has taken up hairstyling as his new hobby.  Last night before bed, as he was brushing and combing (you need both, you know), he told me, “This is just to make your curwy hair vewy smoov.  And then I will make it vewy long.”  I said, “That’s good, Mister Bubby.  You sure know a lot about hair.”  “I do,” he replied.  This morning he brushed and combed my hair with water (from a spray bottle, of course–tools of the trade) and asked when he could get some scissors to cut it.  I told him he had to go to beauty school first.

Here is another post about him from June 2004:

What has really made my day thusfar is that I had an opportunity (while Elvis was napping and PZ was sending Disney e-cards to imaginary e-mail accounts) to play dolls with Mister Bubby.

MB has always been more in touch with his nurturing side than his sister has.  PZ’s baby doll phase lasted about a week.  MB, on the other hand, got plenty of use out of the pink dolly stroller with the flowers on it.  It was really cute to watch him push his Ernie doll around the neighborhood while he made “vroom vroom” noises.

Likewise, he has gotten a lot of pleasure out of our dollhouse.  Like many other Americans, we own the Fisher Price Loving Family dollhouse, because I don’t think toy stores are allowed to sell any other kind (unless they’re one of those hoity-toity toy stores that only sell hand-carved wooden toys too expensive for children to play with).  The mommy and daddy dolls that came with it have these odd mechanical features.  If you pinch her legs together (there’s really no good way to phrase that, is there?), the mommy doll’s torso will sway side to side, so she can rock the baby. When you pinch the daddy doll’s legs, he raises his arms–supposedly so he can pick up the baby, but it doesn’t work very well (unless catapulting the baby could be considered a form of picking it up), and it looks more like he’s making an obscene gesture.  Which actually has made the dollhouse a lot more fun than it would be otherwise.  For my husband, anyway.

This morning I noticed that the mommy doll was missing.  When I asked MB where Mommy was, he said, “Mommy went out the window.  Mommy’s dead.”  (I tried not to take that personally.)  So the first thing we did was have an earthquake, wherein each member of the family, including infants and pets, got thrown around the house, had furniture fall on them and eventually jumped off the balcony.  Mommy doll was eventually found and got into a brawl with Daddy doll in the living room.  (I swear I don’t know where he gets this stuff.)  Mister Bubby’s sensitive side reared its head when the family cat got thrown through the second story window and he couldn’t find him again.  He got this concerned look on his face and asked, “Did my kitty get kiwled?”  As it turned out, the kitty was not mortally wounded but lived to fight with the teddy bear and later take a dump on the family room floor.

We did play out one typical domestic scene when Daddy doll ran around the house making obscene gestures and shouting, “I HAVE TO MAKE DINNER!  I HAVE TO MAKE DINNER!  AAAUUGHHH!”  I can’t wait until he discovers tea parties.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MISTER BUBBY!