The Z Chronicles: Beach Baby

Happy Birthday, Robert! As always, I'm a few days late with this post. We had a busy and fun weekend! I was away almost all day on Friday and part of Saturday afternoon listening to 6 of my students perform at solo and ensemble contest. (5 Superior ratings and 1 Excellent rating = proud teacher!) One of my students, Lanessa, is apparently very shy about practicing in front of her family and her mom heard her play for the very first time on Friday evening. She performed The Water is Wide and when the piece ended I glanced at her mom and saw tears streaming down her face! Moments like that and seeing the kids' beaming faces when their scores are posted never gets old.

Here are a couple of phone pics my students' moms sent me.

Ricky (left) actually reminds me a little bit of a young Robert.

We had friends Josie & Ronnie (with sweet little Leahna) and Tati & Mike over on Saturday evening to celebrate. Robert requested a "brats bar" and we found a great spread in one of our Food Network magazines that included some yummy toppings: Sweet & Sour Onions, Bell Pepper Relish, and Smoky Beer Cheese. I always love an excuse to bake -- especially birthday cakes -- but I ran out of time and didn't get the banana cream pie made. Maybe I was still scared away by last year's cookies & cream sugar bomb. Look at 4 month old Abby! She had such chubby, chubby cheeks!

On Sunday we started Robert's big day off right with breakfast at our favorite restaurant: Datz. After our food coma finally wore off later that afternoon, we decided to head to the beach to enjoy the gorgeous weather. The last time we took Abby to the beach she ate the sand, so we were curious to see how she'd do now that she's a little older.

So much has changed since those crawling and sand eating days!

It turns out Abby loves the water. I couldn't believe how fearless she was! The waves that came in were sometimes chest high and while she was a little surprised when they knocked her over, she was mostly all smiles.