15 (Already!)

A painting a friend from Indiana created for her for her birthday. 

A birthday card drawn by my 89 year old grandfather. 

"The four"

Yesterday Elizabeth celebrated her 15th birthday. My firecracker from birth, this sweet girl with a heart of gold has been earthside for a decade and a half. It seems at times unimaginable that the baby of our family could be this old, but here we are.

We celebrated the day with my parents who came down to North Carolina just for this occasion. Elizabeth got to choose how she wanted to spend her day and what food she wanted to eat, as is customary in our household for birthdays. 

She requested french toast for breakfast, appetizers for lunch, and dinner out at a pub; this was followed by an ice cream birthday cake. 

Elizabeth's birthday coincided with the boys' first day of classes, so she had to share the limelight a bit with them. She was very gracious about that of which I was very thankful. 

Elizabeth wanted to go shopping on her birthday, so we spent a couple of hours shopping at a local indoor mall. We haven't shopped at a  indoor mall since living in Ohio, so it was a pretty weird/cool experience for us. This mall seems to have every single store you could possibly imagine and is set up in a ginormous loop which makes it extremely user friendly. 

She ended up scoring some good deals on some cute clothes which made Elizabeth very happy. That girl loves herself a good deal. 

We came home and chilled for a couple of hours. The birthday girl had requested weeks ago that Andy play her favorite video game with her, and being the sweet big brother he is, he obliged and the two spent some time in video game lane. 

Afterwards, we picked up Josh from soccer and went to dinner where we all enjoyed a good meal. We came home ate some cake and played a couple of rounds of a new board game the kids got from Bobby's parents. 

We were all exhausted from a weekend of visiting that began on the Friday before Elizabeth's birthday, so we ended up going to bed around 10. Elizabeth was happy because she got to read a book that she asked her Nana and Papa to get for her months ago. She has been dying to own the series and plans on devouring the books over the next few days. 

Overall, I think she had a good day. 

15. Wow. Time truly stops for no man.