Well, he turned ten quite a few days ago now, but I was otherwise occupied and couldn’t get to do this post. Oops.

The actual time he hit precisely ten years old when taking into account time zones, leap years, the fact that years are not an even number of days, etc. was September 13th at 02:52 UTC. That would be September 12th at 7:52 PM Pacific time, 10:52 PM Eastern.

The actual moment passed without much notice because we waited until the weekend to do the actual celebrations. Alex’s best friend Kaylin came over for a sleepover, and we did the usual thing with presents. It was a good birthday. Everybody had fun.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALEX!!

A little bit before the birthday, I attempted to do the traditional annual interview. The last few years Alex has decided to talk less and less on these, and instead do other things. At least last year, after a few minutes he did start talking. This year, nope. But here is what we got. (With guest cameos by Amy to help with transitions.)

Oh, and for the few of you who might care, I set up a playlist that includes all the previous interviews and a few other random home movie sorts of things including Alex. It is here.

Just a few highlights this year. As he gets older, it is up to Alex what he shares, not me.

• Alex’s YouTube channel ALeXMXeLA is up to 63 subscribers (13 more than this time last year). Help get him to 100! Subscribe!
• We are still many years behind in posting videos to the channel. When posting videos “in order,” we are posting videos recorded when he was six. This last year we’ve also done a lot of live streams as well though, which also are published on the channel once they are over. Alex has said he wants to stop producing much new content until we can catch up a bit though. As part of that, he has said that after we get to publishing the 200th in order video, instead of him doing lots of editing in Final Cut Pro, he wants me to push out a few hundred videos straight out of the recordings to save time. We’ll see how that goes. I still need to find the time to do THAT.
• Alex is now in FOURTH grade. He is testing several grade levels higher in math, and halfway through high school in terms of reading level though, so I suspect he is somewhat bored, although he won’t explicitly admit it.
• He usually doesn’t read books, though. Wikis. Not Wikipedia, but niche wiki’s about video games. Minecraft. Terraria. Five Nights at Freddy’s. Subnautica. Whatever. If it is a game he has played, watched being played, or is considering playing, he searches the web and finds the best wiki on that game and then studies it until he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the game. Then he quizzes people in the family about trivia from those games and laughs when we do not know the answers.
• He and his dog Miley are still best friends, but now we also have Jetski. We got Jetski last December. As I post this on September 21st, it is his first birthday. He is huge. He is crazy. He is a puppy. Alex and Jetski have a love-hate relationship. They play together constantly. Jetski usually finds Alex to cuddle with when they sleep. But Jetski is a puppy and plays with his teeth, and Alex riles him up to play continuously, and eventually, Alex gets mad at Jetski for being too rough, even though Alex started it. So they are still learning. I think they are both getting better about this as they get older though. Miley usually watches from a distance. You can see the thought bubble over her head. “Kids. What can you do?”

As usual, there is lots more. But this is enough.

Happy birthday Alex!!!