Caleb's birthday camping trip- Part 1, mostly

As I said in my previous post, Caleb would play in a tennis tournament every weekend if he could.  But we decided that, for his birthday, it would be best to take a break from tennis and enjoy some togetherness with Miss Peggy. So we made an early weekend of it by packing up Miss Peggy and heading out of town on a Thursday morning (as in, two-weeks-ago-tomorrow-kinda Thursday).

 Since we live on the East coast of Florida, we wanted to venture over to the West coast so the dumplings could check out the Gulf of Mexico.  It has been almost two years since we've done that.

 Since Caleb's birthday fell on Sunday, we knew we would be celebrating early...well, the cake part....because there was no way I was going to attempt baking a cake in the trailer. 

 Nope, instead I baked it up the day before and frosted it the morning we left.  A bit of advice?  Don't frost a cake the morning you're supposed to pack up and head out on a camping trip.  Poor Patrick ended up doing most of the work.  Well, we forgot to pack candles to put on the cake. So a citronella candle played the part of birthday candle. And instead of Madeline blowing out the candle prematurely as has happened in years past, this time it was Havi!  That's why Patrick had to cup his hand over her mouth, that stinker!  Candle blowing out- take 2!

 And here's my feeble attempt at a tennis inspired cake- tennis court green with 'tennis balls' on top.  I am in no way an artist.  Remember the key word is inspired here.  Then Caleb opened up a few presents- a Wii Resort replacement and some match box cars to zoom through the trailer.

 As we were settling down for the evening that night, Patrick kept asking me if I had seen the keys to his truck.  Nope.  Well, eventually he told me he locked them inside his truck.  Yep.  That's kinda fun, well if you get paid for a living to break into people's vehicles.

 The dumplings spent the morning riding their bikes around the campsites, playing on the playground, and just hanging out.

Then after lunch, we decided to head over to the beach.  We couldn't just walk out to the water like the campground close to home.  So we had to hop in the truck and drive over.  The temps were only in the high 70s.  So I knew the surf temp would be too cold to swim.  Silly me.  I should've put the dumplings in their swimsuits anyways. They played in the sand and water until they were soaked through and shivering.

After stripping down and drying off, we headed back to the campsite.  The kidlets played outside, riding bikes, digging in the dirt/mud, and watching the sun set.

And it's funny, as I sit here and type, I am thinking to myself, "Didn't I get any photos of that?"  Well, sure I did.  I just completely forgot about including them in this post!  And since it's so very long already, I'm going to awkwardly cut this post short, right in the middle of the day. lol  I hope you don't mind.  

And on a completely different topic, our social worker is coming tomorrow for Havi's 6 month post placement visit.  How crazy is that?  It's almost a year ago that we first saw that precious little face of hers.  It's hard to believe she's been in our arms for half of that time.