This time last year I was sitting in a hospital bed basking in the joy of having given birth for a second time. I was either gazing at Tebow’s beautiful red hair or trying to figure out why they gave us the smallest hospital room in the joint.

Well, 365 days have passed and Tebow is officially a year old. My baby boy.

Since we have been under renovation at our house, separating our family for a short while, I was fretting over birthday party plans.

See, I have this kind of birthday philosophy. I don’t think birthday parties are a requirement for every birthday. But I do think they are important for the first birthday. It isn’t because the child will remember the perfect cake, the tower of presents, and the many guests. When Fuller turned one, we worked for weeks on a party for him. But it was kind of more of a celebration of us, making it through the first year as parents.

This time around, I had this overwhelming desire to invite people to celebrate Tebow’s first year as a way to say “thank you” to them for blessing our family.
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While we have been visiting/ living in Lake Martin, we have had been blessed with some tasty treats.

These brownies were made by Fuller and me soon after our visit began. Grandma Linda was given a Perfect Brownie Pan as a Christmas gift, so we thought it the perfect time to try it out! It really did make brownies well. (There is an entire flickr set of the process, in case you want to see how the pan really works.)

These funny looking things are “squid” in the making. We went into Montgomery to visit a friend and she was so clever to make this fun lunch for the kiddos. You cut up hot dogs, stick in pieces of spaghetti, then boil them until the spaghetti is cooked al dente. When you pull it out of the water, you have squid!

Last Friday I went to a gourmet grocery store with Linda and came home with a few delicacies such as microbrewed rootbeer. I thought it would be fun to introduce Fuller to rootbeer floats. (Sidenote: a freezer without ice cream at Grandpa Albert’s must be a broken freezer.) Fuller liked it, and since a full bottle was too much for Fuller, I got to have some too.

It was during the root beer float fun that Grandpa Albert taught Fuller how to say, “Over the lips, past the gums, look out stomach, here it comes!” Fuller worked so hard to learn it and say it right. Now, if only he would finally remember the days of the week.

much.

The boys and I are still in Alabama. The news of yesterday’s magnificent winter weather was a bit hard for me to hear. I really was sad to be in gray, damp Alabama instead of the winter wonderland of Chattanooga. I watched facebook and twitter statuses stream by describing the sledding, shredding, slipping, and sipping (hot cocoa!). All I could think of was Fuller’s snow boots, snow suit, and gloves tucked away in the mud room missing out on the fun.

It didn’t help that I married into a family that isn’t afraid to be vocal of their dislike of winter. They actually tried to convince me it was a good thing I was just watching it rain instead of improvising sleds for Fuller out of cardboard and cookie sheets. And I’m quite aware that my husband, who prefers warm to cold, wishes he was here instead of there.

But, no, I’m not pouting. Instead, yesterday Fuller spent some time on the make-shift links next to the lake.

Fuller’s love of Wii golf has made him interested in real golf and the little plastic clubs here at the lake were insufficient for Grandpa Albert. So a trip into town ended up as a shopping trip for kids’ clubs. These will live here at the lake, for all grandkids to enjoy. And yes, Fuller has enjoyed them.

And I promise, as Fuller has fun outside without his snow boots and snow suit, I’m not pouting.

Much.

Tebow has earned himself a nickname, “Tebow the Tornado.” He will walk/ stumble his way to an area of a room, destroy it and then move on to the next area. He takes great pleasure in toppling block towers and thinks that Legos/ Duplos should reside in the natural state of a pile on the floor. In fact, Grandpa Albert has occupied Tebow for many minutes by building brick towers out of Megablocks and Tebow will then take them apart in seconds, as if telling Grandpa Albert there is no reason for those bricks to be stacked on top of each other.

Which is why Fuller’s Christmas gift of the Jenga game is confusing to Tebow.

He sees this:

Isn’t it begging for tiny hands to knock it over? Tebow thinks so. And when we end up playing with Tebow around, Tebow reaches, grunts, and whines while Fuller and I take our turns playing the game.

The first time Tebow saw us playing, I was the one who lost, knocking the tower down when removing a crucial block. Tebow saw the blocks, picked up two and threw them down in anger. My baby was angry because he was not the one who knocked down the tower.

Someday we will let him play in our reindeer games, but right now, I guess we need to stick to playing Jenga when Tebow is napping. We can’t have a game ruined by a tornado.

Soon after we got to Lake Martin last week, I mentioned wanting to go to one of the Auburn basketball games. It happened that Auburn would be playing Kentucky, so we got excited and made plans. But apparently a lot of other people got excited as well (probably mostly Kentucky fans) and when I checked the ticket site on Saturday morning I found out the general tickets were all sold out.

Rain dashed our ideas of buying from scalpers so Albert and Linda generously gave their tickets to Fuller and me.

This gift was generous because Albert and Linda have magic tickets that not only get them entrance to the games but access to the hospitality suite (aka free food, drinks, and Fuller’s favorite: POPCORN!). Also, it meant they were going to keep Tebow while Fuller and had a mother-son date. It all adds up to generous giving.
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Last Wednesday the kids and I packed up the car (I did most of the packing, Tebow did a lot of whining, and Fuller was fetching things like a good kid), kissed Damon goodbye (though I did help him move our bed first), and drove to Lake Martin to spend a few weeks with Grandpa Albert and Grandma Linda.

While trips to Lake Martin are usually of the rest/ relaxation/ spoil the grandkids variety, this trip is actually more of a relocation for us for a few weeks. We fled from Chattanooga with the dream of returning to a home with a newly renovated master bedroom/ main bathroom.

Yes, that is right! Damon has made the foray into the final big project for renovating our fixer-upper! I’m beyond excited, but I sit lakeside enjoying pretty sunsets and nature walks, my husband has been tirelessly working in the evenings doing demo work, plumbing, and framing. From what I understand work on the new drywall began today, so things are progressing.

Our time here at Lake Martin is relaxing (this place kind of oozes relaxation) but I have cracked the whip a little, bringing the homeschool books, pencils, and even the safety scissors to keep us moving along in the education arena. But we have traveled a little- visiting Grandma Great in Auburn yesterday. Fuller and I took in the Kentucky versus Auburn basketball game last Saturday, which really added to the family fun (it was like a little mother-son date!).

We hope to go back in the next few weeks, but until then we are looking forward to seeing the changes and enjoying our time here in Alabama.