Josiah's 13.

Josiah turned 13 yesterday. I now have 3 teenagers in the house. Lucky for me I happen to really like teens, my own included. :) It's really neat to see them developing into their own people.

Since Eric was working all day yesterday, Josiah chose to celebrate today.

Joe's choices for meals have had me in the kitchen all day long. For breakfast he wanted Apple Fritters a la Pioneer Woman. I have never deep fried anything in my house except recently we made fried ice cream. And it made the house stink. So today I fired up the side burner on the grill and fried the fritters out on the front porch. No stink, and I got to enjoy my morning a bit. :)

For lunch he wanted summer sausage and cheese on artisan bread. It's really easy to make it, and we all enjoy eating it. Another hit.

For his "cake" he wanted to take chocolate chip cookie dough balls and roll them in melted chocolate. Yum. We will enjoy them for snack.

And for dinner this evening, he requested shrimp. For those who don't like shrimp, I will serve "squid". All will be satisfied.



And thus endeth Birthday Season 1 - where we celebrate 6 birthdays between Dec. 25 and March 17. Phew. I survived. But please don't look at the weight I've gained... I'm working on losing some before we hit Birthday Season 2 - 4 birthdays between July 2 and August 2. I'll start (again) tomorrow.

Truth in Blogging

I just wanted to let you know that not all days look like this in the Peterson household.



Many days don't even look like this.



Many of my days are filled with the mundane... the crazy... the insane...

The crying
The cooking
The never ending laundry.
The pages upon pages of school to correct.

So this post is for you. If you have ever wondered if you are permanently destroying all chances of your children being productive members of society.

I've been there too.

Just so you know you're not alone. :)

Nate's Boogie Board Adventure

Even Nate learned to boogie board on our trip.



OK- maybe not.



But he sure fooled us!



It's tough being so darn cute.

Road Trip Part 2

Lots and lots of playing in the water for Emma...



I think this board was particularly good for Matt. It suits him.



And the expressions on Anna and Emma's faces here are priceless...



Nate had gotten a splinter in his hand, and wore that paper towel all morning after it was out.



Sara collected shells for everyone, and let us choose.




Here's my shell.






See the pretzel in the seagull's mouth?



The big boys heading out.



Beth was happy as long as her feet never had to touch the sand.






And lots of playing "Blitz" with frisbees... a few adults forgot their ages and played like kids. I think they regretted it the next day.

And, oh, the sunrises... they were worth the price of admission.

Road Trip 1

We recently had the opportunity to visit friends who are staying on the beach. I thought it would be fun to surprise the kids to a trip to see their friends. I was going to pack the car and just wake them up when it was time to leave and say to grab pillows, that we were going to Florida.

But I soon came to realize that was going to be too hard. So I told them that I had saved some money, and would they like to surprise Eric and kidnap him to a hotel with an indoor pool for a night. They thought that was a great idea. :) So they were surprising Eric, but really we were surprising them.



On Thursday morning we were at Eric's work at 7 when he got off duty. The kids thought I was acting suspiciously, so thought they had figured out the surprise - they thought that we were meeting their grandparents at the hotel with a pool! They were so convinced that Anna said, "I love surprises. But you can never pull one off on us."



Ha! I did it! 13 and a half hours later we were in Florida, just in time to watch the Delta Rocket take off. At least we saw it from a hundred miles away. But we still saw it.



And thus started a week of having a great and relaxing time with friends.

The kids played in a kayak. But it wasn't in the water.

And seashells became currency.









It was a bit cold the first couple days, but they all had fun anyway.









To avoid overload of those family members with dial up (you know who you are... ) I will post more photos in a separate post... stay tuned...


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Cousins

(Grandparent post alert!!! All who really don't care about photos of just the kids can just go come back another day. I am working on a post about our trip to Florida, which will probably be broken to several posts so that I don't overload any one post with the bazillion photos I got.)

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On our trip we were able to confirm that these two boys who are only 5 days apart, and gave their Mama's similar pregnancies are truly very, very similar in looks... as suspected.



And although in all these photos Jeremiah seems to be bigger than Sam, they are really quite close in size also.



And they weigh almost the same, although Jeremiah is slightly heavier.



And Jeremiah is louder, too. He talks all the time!!! He had some stories to tell. And someday we'll know what he was telling us. I cannot wait to see these two boys playing together as they get older.

Quiet...

If you have noticed that the blog was quiet the last week, it is because I was watching a lot of sunrises instead of blogging. I'll post all about it this afternoon, hopefully.

Since quiet is not something I will usually get with 10 children running around all the time, I will tell you it was a WONDERFUL week at the beach... peaceful and full of great fellowship.

And You Capture's theme happens to be quiet this week, so go there to see other people's photos of quiet, peace-giving things.