Beeeeeeach

As we have for years past, we set out on Friday to stop halfway to the beach in the ever-popular hotel with the beloved glass elevator.

This year, the difference is that we had Maddie along.

Yayy!

My Mother’s Day present from Jason this year was a booking for a sunset dinner cruise the first night of our beach arrival, complete with champagne package. 😍

Dolphins frolicked all around our boat.

Spanish moss.

The cruise ship they use for actual dolphin tours, but I’m not convinced they encountered more than we did.

The next day this tubby guy was lurking under the bridge we take to get to the beach.

The view through the bridge under our feet.

I’m sure he’s friendly

We took our bikes and Jason’s newest drone out to the beach that evening.

The mall

The squish is over. 

Coral model

Sports tournaments, awards banquets, dances, Sunday school, summer job paperwork, graduation parties, and school are all done.

Summer clothes…that’s a hard one, isn’t it? 

It’s been a couple years since Ada and I have made our regular shopping trek, but my daughters united in petitioning me to take them, so we seized on the only spring Saturday when we were all in town and didn’t have school or a soccer game.

Liz was (somewhat literally) dizzied by the vastness of the mall but was very successful in the hunt. I came home with little more than a hat that I impulse bought because Ada said it looked cute on me, but I really just went to help Lizzy anyway.

A hat, and insecurities.

Ada convinced me to try on a pair of stylish wide-leg jeans (“Just try it”) and they were horrifyingly unflattering. The mall is full of impossible outfits that I would protest can’t look good on anyone, until I see the adolescents strolling by already wearing them.

The mall is a danger to my psyche. 

Thank God my anchor runs deeper.

Perish every fond ambition,

All I’ve sought or hoped or known.

Yet how rich is my condition!

God and heaven are still my own.

~ Henry Lyte, “Jesus, I My Cross Have Taken”

“May is squishy”

 

I could’ve sworn I read a pithy quote about how the month of May has all the things squished into it, but Google won’t tell me what it is now.

Morning view of the lake where we went on a super-quick getaway as a children’s ministry team

Sports tournaments.

Graduation parties.

Awards banquets.

Final exams.

Finishing school.

Getting it all in place for next year’s school.

Recruiting teachers for summer Sunday school and VBS.

Thanking the past year’s teachers.

Summer job paperwork.

A college student moving back in.

Spring dances.

Summer clothes.

I had the best Mother’s Day. This was my delightful charcuterie dinner.

Coral model the kids are growing from some mixture of poisonous chemicals. Deadly but so pretty!

Then add in the oil changes, inspections, and registration renewals that the cars need; and every kind of appointment from the doctor to the vet to new glasses to the HVAC to the orthodontist; and then when somebody inadvertently honors me with an invitation to their birthday party I about lose my mind.

I’ve turned into my parents

 

It was bad enough to realize that Ada asking me for first-person advice on what she should wear to an 80’s dance was the same as when I asked my parents what I should wear to a 50’s and 60’s dance in middle school—

Oh no. I’m just now doing the math and realizing that it’s not the same. The 50’s and 60’s were only about thirty years past when I went to that dance, and the 80’s are now forty years ago.

As I said, that was bad enough. Then came Ada’s complaint about the vegetable peeler.

Yes, I had noticed that the vegetable peeler no longer, you know, peels vegetables. It actually still does ok on carrots, but it’s worn into the exact curvature of an apple so it doesn’t in fact peel them, it just conforms to them.  

It’s not a fruit peeler, ok?! Ada asks so much.

She pointed out how old it is while I melodramatically ordered a new one from Amazon (they come in colors now!).

As I debated excruciatingly whether to get it in sapphire or mint or teal, I thought of how we mercilessly teased my own mom throughout our childhood about her vegetable scrub brush, which, slight exaggeration aside, had about 2 skinny bristles left by the time I came into consciousness. Whether true or not, we always said she wouldn’t get rid of it because it was a wedding present, which would’ve made it about a million years old in kid years. 

The vegetable brush became legendary.

As I tried to push back on Ada’s profligate suggestion that we could buy a new vegetable peeler, I cast my mind back to when I got it…and realized…I think…I got it around the time of my marriage. 

Twenty years ago.

#tbt

 

This guy is about to finish his first year of college!

Spring

 

Grandma and Grandpa at Easter dinner

We’re plugging along and the countdown to the end of the year has begun.

Visiting my friend’s new hobby farm

Jeddy has finals next week and then he’ll move out of the dorm and back home for the first half of the summer, until his new lease starts.

Ada has one more week of classes after Jed, and then she just needs to finish up a questionnaire for me so I can give her her health/PE credit. Lizzy and Caleb will finish their math classes at the same time, and then we just have two and a half weeks of Mom school until we’re done done done.

This guy came to our window to admire our tulips, but the window is too high for Buck to see out of it. He is still happily naked and healing pretty well even without stitches.

The girls just have the state track meet left, and then they’ll start swim season. Ada has a spring non-formal dance coming up; an unrelated follow-up to the formal of two weeks ago.

And I couldn’t be happier about the warm spring weather.