Ladies and Gentlemen, We Have a Fifteen Year Old

It's true.  Our first-born in the wilderness has hit the 1-5.  And I'd have to say that this momentous occasion could be divided up into a few highs and just one, minor little low.  (Although, if you check out the expressions on his face in almost every picture over the last couple of days, it may seem like 

there were a lot more lows than that.  Hahahaha.)

Monday morning started out bright and early with me running to get breakfast donuts for the birthday boy and then stopping at the grocery store to pick up all the necessary supplies for making this year's requested birthday cake -- a Fortnite Llama.  Yep.  A llama.  After doing a quick image search on Google the night before, I was feeling pretty confident I could make his dreams come true.  

Once I was back home and had presented Ethan with his donuts and first birthday wishes of the day, I got to work on that cake.  The rest of the day was devoted to baking, assembling, and decorating a llama -- and REALLY trying to make Ethan's birthday wishes come true by taking him to get his Driver's Permit on his big day.  Spoiler alert -- here comes the Low.

To start off, we showed up at the wrong DMV (we were supposed to go to one with a testing center).  After sitting for a few minutes and doing some googling, I realized the mistake and we drove to the correct place.  THEN, we waited in line for about 45 minutes before we finally made it to the desk, only to find out that they wouldn't accept Ethan's end-of-year report card as his proof of having a greater than 2.0 GPA because we needed an official form from the high school with an official transcript from his old school.  Since it was his birthday, and I knew this was the only thing he really wanted to have happen that day, we got back in the car and drove ALL the way over to the other side of town to try and track down these forms and transcripts so that we could drive all the way back to make it in time before the testing services closed at 4:30.  (It was already quarter to 3 at this point.) 

Well, the bad luck followed us, because when we got to the high school, we had missed the school registrar by 5 minutes and then when we tried to track down his new guidance counselor, we discovered she wasn't in for the day.  Womp womp.  We filled out some forms, left it with a secretary,  and then slouched back home in defeat.

The rest of my afternoon was devoted to finishing up that cake, ordering Ethan's birthday request of pizza for dinner, and then heading over to some new friends from church who had invited us over for Family Home Evening and a pool party.  It was just a little bonus that Ethan got a lagniappe "friend party" on a non-friend-party-year.  ;)

 None of the kids caught my "Emperor's New Groove" reference, which was slightly disappointing.  Haha.

The party continued the next day, when I took the kids to pick out Ethan's birthday presents and then took everyone to the trampoline park to jump for an hour in the afternoon.  Some more lagniappe showed up on our front porch yesterday morning when a friend of Ethan and Grace's from church biked over to come and help with some building projects I'm thinking of doing around the house.  He ended up spending the rest of the day with us and becoming an honorary member of the family while we enjoyed the rest of Ethan's birthday celebrations.  :)

All in all, I think he had a pretty good couple of days.  :)  Now, if we can just track down that transcript...