Another Teenager!!!

Happy Birthday to Michael.....he is 13......officially a teenager. Now we have two in our house! Having had a few years of experience, Bob & I agree that the "pre-teen-bad-attitude"years are much more frightening than the actual teenage ones. In fact, we already made Jonny PROMISE us that he would not succumb to this stage, but despite his best intentions, time seems to be preying on him. We are very happy for Michael to have reached teenager status....we love you, Michael!

The sleepover gang was still asleep this morning when Crispy & I left for hockey at 10:30. Apparently they had made it past 2:30 am before crashing for the rest of the night. While we were gone, Bob took the boys to the massive sledding hill at the entrance of town. This thing is huge! It is the size of a small mountain, taking at least 5 minutes to climb it from it's base, formed by the intentionally deposited excavation dirt from the renovated park and new developments around here (and there are a TON). According to the kids, it is "awesome", "scary", and "fun". Here is a picture taken from the top:

I prepared Michael's favorite meal for lunch.....grilled cheese and tomato soup...that was just perfect after a morning of sledding and a cold hockey arena. We followed that up with a very yummy Hockey Ice Cream Cake from Dairy Queen and mint Oreos....yummy, yummy! While they waited for their ride to arrive, the boys played some game with a Dora soccer ball, which was very upsetting to Laura~but when she resolutely went downstairs to reclaim it, she ended up playing and giggling with them all!

JAM & Jellies restarted this evening for the kids at church...they will be working on an Easter program. Melissa got to pretend to be an innkeeper today, and Jonny played an apparently funny Abedenigo. Michael opened his birthday presents while munching on a few mini bagels (our dinner) in the 20 minute time block we had between church and his own hockey practice. He now has enough of his own pieces to go paintballing with his friends. He's psyched! But his best surprise present was a tiny pine cone from Great-Uncle Rich....ask him about it sometime...I don't have the room to explain it here.

I am going outside to videotape Bob's Christmas Light Show with my new video camera....tonight is the last night, and we are all going to miss it(but it WILL be nice to turn on the lights in the Library and in the girls' room at night again!). If the recording turns out well, Bob is going to enter it into an online contest. We made it into our local newspaper last week, so the next obvious step would be to go national! Wish him luck!