Our solo trip with Matthew!

(Three oldest children in the car.  Things are about to get REALLY bossy.)

 A few months  back, when Thomas and Mary Beth were registered for a 2 week stay at Kanakuk and Matthew had decided to stay home so as not to miss strength and conditioning at the high school, Bryon and I decided to surprise Matthew with a weekend trip for the three of us!  We are starting to get that feeling that time is running out with him at home and that we might not ever see him again when he gets his license in 16 months, so we want to capitalize on the time we have with him!

As much as he loves to fish, we decided to take him back to the Gulf Coast of Alabama!  We kept telling him that we were going to Conroe where his grandparents live.  He didn't quite believe us, so when we stopped there for dinner, we told him that rather than ending our trip here, we would keep on driving until we got to Alabama!  He was thrilled!!

 We spent the first day of the trip in our favorite town, Fairhope.  My favorite book store in the world is there, and Matthew and Bryon's favorite fishing store it there.  I loaded up on books and the boys bought a new fishing pole for Matthew.

 Then we headed to the end of the street and watched Matthew fish off the dock in Mobile Bay.  Cool salt water breezes and a happy son.  Paradise!

 The next day we drove down to Orange Beach.  It is just an hour away from Fairhope.  We were bummed that the forecast called for rain, but it didn't rain until we left that evening!

 After a day at the beach, we headed back to Fairhope to get a book signed by Oliver North.  Matthew and Bryon had just had a conversation about Oliver North the day before, not knowing that he would be at "my bookstore"!  Bryon's debate topic the year he won state was about whether Oliver North was a hero or criminal.  I told Matthew that my biggest memory of Oliver North was that he was on tv nonstop my 7th grade summer thereby interrupting my soap opera watching!  A huge surprise waiting for us at the Page and Palette was getting to meet Sid Phillips (and his sister) who who was one of the characters portrayed in the miniseries The Pacific.  He wrote a book on his experiences at Guadalcanal and I read almost the entire book on our way home from Alabama.  They were both a treasure to speak to!

 On the last day of our trip, we took Matthew fishing.  My cousin lives in Fairhope, and he recommended a fabulous fishing guide.  He was awesome!  We caught a ton of trout and I even caught a redfish.  The guide filleted the fish and we stuck it in a cooler and drove home.

 I think it would be appropriate at this point to say that when I look at this boy who is looking more and more like a man every day, I still see that rascally two year old he once was.  The child who popped my Explorer out of gear and guided it down my parents driveway at 25 months of age, whose pediatrician recommended we put in an adult seat belt in the car when he turned three, because it was safer than the constant figuring out how to get out of child car seats (we were on carseat number 4 when he was 18 months old), who urinated in our fake ficus tree in the kitchen (hey, it's a tree, mom!), who locked me in his room after I turned the door knobs around because he wouldn't stay in time out, who I used to call my old youth minister in tears on how to raise a cross between Dennis the Menace/Huckleberry Finn/Einstein/and maybe a mid 20th century eastern European dictator, and has now become one of my very favorite people to be around! Yes, the child who used to keep me up at night worrying how he would be as a teenager is kind hearted, helpful, the hardest worker I know, reasonable, interesting to talk to, forthcoming with all the goings on of his peer group, a great student and athlete, charming, and perhaps the funniest human being in my life.  This child keeps me in TEARS and laughing so hard that I can't catch my breath.  Matthew and I share a sense of humor that the rest of the family doesn't understand but accepts. :)  The teenager of mine is a reward for not returning his preschool self back to the wild when I was sure that he was actually the child of wolves! ;)  Love this boy of mine!!