Leif's 9th Birthday - Honolulu, Hawaii - January 28, 1984 - Age 9

No broken arm in this one. :) This was Leif's first birthday in Hawaii. He was in third grade at Red Hill Elementary School and had a couple of good friends, Michael, who was a terrific artist, and Joey, with whom he could play GI Joe stuff. He was growing up fast.

He was in a special, very small class for gifted underachieving boys. Leif never liked academics. He could just listen and get it all, and could see little reason to bother with exerting himself to prove it in written work. The young man who taught this special weekly class did a fantastic job with those boys. He had them designing board games and writing the rules for them . . . and they had to be actually playable.

Leif took judo classes for the first time, tried a pottery class, and enjoyed going to the beach. We went to many different beaches in Hawaii, but our favorite was Bellows Beach. Later I'll post some photos taken there.

I have to smile when I see this cake. Another example of my less than expert cake decorating ability, but I think I had some Leif help with this one, which features some kind of space ship, something he spent a lot of time drawing then. At that age, he liked doing this kind of thing. Remember the giant R2D2 cookie he made and decorated at about the same age, that I posted before.

You can see that he is growing and changing, not a little boy any more (though he was always tall), and there is a sort of seriousness and tentativeness about him.

Happy Birthday, Leif!

Leif's giant R2D2 cookie

Leif and his brother loved Star Wars and Star Trek all their lives. Those movies and television shows influenced their views of the world, the future, morality, and more. They were significant far beyond their entertainment value.

When Leif was 9 years old, he wanted to make a giant R2D2 cookie. I helped him to figure out how to make the cookie shape and we rolled it out. Then he decorated it in amazing detail with frosting. He was so cute and earnest about it.

We were living in Hawaii at that time and Leif spent a lot of this time with big imaginative things from Star Wars to GI Joe figurines and vehicles, from his black Members Only jacket to toy guns. More about that later. I think it was in Hawaii that he first began to get the idea of being "Mr. Cool," though you can't really tell that in these photos when he's wearing his pajamas.