Today is A.J.’s 8th birthday!    Even though I’m laid up in bed while I heal,  I wanted to be sure that he had a special day.   So I sent Rich to Target with all the kids, and each one picked out their own gift for A.J.   Then at the end of the night,  everyone came up to my room so that I could watch A.J. open up his gifts.

Oh, and if you are wondering….the dark smudges on everyone’s foreheads are ashes from the 7:00pm Ash Wednesday mass.  I’m bummed that I wasn’t able to attend, but so grateful that Rich went and took all of the children with him.  We are all trying to decide what we are going to do to celebrate this season in Lent.  Usually we “give up” something that is a personal sacrifice (like candy or tv or video games) but I’m thinking this year we should perhaps consider  “doing for”  instead of  “giving up”  — I will blog about that in a future post.

I tried to get a photo of each sibling next to A.J. with the gift that they gave him.  I try to do this every year with each child’s birthday so that as time goes on we can all look back and see what everyone gave to each other over the years.  My kids LOVE buying each other gifts.

Rich always has to play the clown…

When I was about 5 months pregnant with A.J., I saw the movie Armageddon for the first time, and I absolutely fell in love with Ben Afflect’s character, “A.J. Frost”.  He was brave, sweet, sentimental, and funny~ all characteristics that I admire in a boy (and a man!).

So  I said to Rich, “If this baby is a boy, can we name him A.J.?”

and Rich said, “Sure, but what will the A and the J stand for?”

and I said, “I don’t know.  We’ll think of something.”

So once we found out he was a boy,  A.J. was his name.  A few months later, we decided on names to go with the initials. We chose “Adam” because we both loved that name, and then we chose “John” because that was my father’s name.  I like for the middle names to be family names.

A.J. was born on March 9th, 2003.  His actual due date was 03/03/03  which I thought would be a VERY cool birthday to have!  But…like all my boys, A.J. was too comfy in the womb and didn’t want to come out until much later.  He was born on 03/09/03…which I still think is a pretty cool birthday!  He was my first 10 pound baby, weighing 10 pounds 6 ounces!

A.J. is the only child who has my blue eyes ~ which, by the way, I inherited from my father.  Isn’t it neat that the child  I named after my father is the only one who got his eye color?