halfway through 3rd grade, 9 and a half yrs old

Cade is in 3rd grade now and is 9 and a half. His best friends are Ethan and Mateo. He has been best friends with them both for a few years. It is nice that Mateo lives next door and Ethan lives down around the corner so they can walk or ride bikes to each other's houses. He plays on 2 flag football teams. He also goes to a strength training twice a week to help his agility, strength, balance, etc. He is still too young to use any weights so he just does things such as sprints, climbing up a very tall rope, pushing logs, going across monkey bars- also with hands on the outside of the bars, and I'm not sure what else. While I often go with him to his strength training- moms don't pay as much attention to these things as dads do :) He is also in the bears den in Cub Scouts. With practice, games, strength training and scouts he sometimes gets pooped out and just wants to stay home and play with friends (luckily his best friends are on one of his fb teams), play video games, and veg out. Because he has made commitments to all of these things we make him continue to go. He is fine once he gets there, it's just that sometimes he would just rather not go.
He still does very well in school. He is learning division now and last week while doing some math homework he started to get angry and frustrated. He couldn't figure out how to do the division problems (they had just learned this new style of division that week). After explaining it to him and him completing the entire page of math problems in like 2 minutes he continued to get upset.
I had to lay into him a little bit. He expects perfection of himself. He always has.
As a little boy I would tell him to go get his jammies from his drawer. He would go in and get them from a very full drawer and when shutting the drawer some of the clothes would be in the way. He would carefully remove as many clothing items as needed and carefully 'fold' - which was more of a roll when a 3 yr old is doing it, and replace them so they would fit nicely. He would then close the drawer tightly. I watched him do this with his drawers MANY times. Most kids would just stuff the clothes back in the drawer and shut it, even if clothes were still hanging out and the drawer wouldn't shut tight.
If I left something open- such as a drawer or cupboard in my bathroom, he would make sure to close them. He likes things the way they should be. He used to always make his bed. He has since stopped doing that but really all it would require is pulling the comforter up nicely. He also has taken a liking to having legos set up all over his room in proper fighting stance- good guys on one side and bad guys across from them. On occasion I do make him pick them all up so I can vacuum his room. Being TOO neat and tidy isn't healthy. Expecting perfection of oneself isn't healthy either. So I explained to him how he is human. There is only one person who ever walked this earth that was perfect. I told him how he needs to stop expecting himself to never make mistakes. That is how we learn and grow and if he never makes any mistakes then he won't learn much. I told him to quit being so hard on himself and to not get mad at himself when he makes mistakes. So you drop a football. Who cares?! You miss one on your spelling test. No big deal! You bonk into your sister's head and chip your tooth off. It's fixable! He is getting better and I will continue to remind him that these things are ok. I try to tell him how great he is at everything so he will have good self esteem because it seems he can do 100 things 'right' (in his eyes) but when he does one 'wrong' (in his eyes) thing then he's upset. He IS a great kid and does well in many areas. I couldn't be a prouder mom of this boy!!!!
He continues to love his baby brother to pieces. The first thing he says when he walks in the door from school is, "where's Cash?". He plays well with him and makes him giggle. It won't be long until Cash is looking up to him and wanting to be just like him.
Cade and Cloee are the two kiddos that bicker. It gets annoying and we can't figure out why they do it and who instigates it. They know each others buttons to push. For quite a while now (maybe a few years) Cloee has slept with Carlee. Recently Carlee was sick and so we told Cloee to sleep in with Cade. She has pretty much every night ever since. It is so cute- Cade got out a stack of Dr Suess books (way under Cade's reading level) and will read to Cloee every night. I love it. It is so sweet to see.
Cade is pretty obedient and when asked to do something he typically will get up and do it right then and there. He used to - without fail- do it RIGHT when asked, every single time. Since Cash has been born I think he sees that Mom and Dad are a little bit more preoccupied (having 4 kids and all) and so he doesn't always so things right when asked, but is still probably 80%-90%. It is definitely doable. And even if he doesn't do it right away he will still remember to do it in a while without having to be retold.
He is a great kid and makes us smile many times each day.