To celebrate his birthday, we began with pancakes for breakfast. He likes them simple: plain buttermilk fluffiness with a pat of butter and a generous glug of local, 100% maple syrup on top.
Siblings pitched in to do his chores for him, which is the customary gift around these parts since none of them have income or money with which to buy presents for one another. Gabriel spent the time he would normally have been doing his chores listening to music on his bed while writing-- two of his favorite pastimes. Following schoolwork, Daddy came home to pick him up and bring him to the church for some fun with the basketball hoops.
For dinner, he wanted chicken and biscuits. I was happy to oblige. We ended the evening watching a baseball flick.
(Sports, music, and down-home kinds of food are this boy's love languages, I tell you.)
Tomorrow, relatives will come over for apple crisp topped with homemade whipped cream. We'll sing boisterously and he'll open a few gifts.
Friday, two of his buddies will accompany him home from Friday School, spend the afternoon here, share a meal with us (by request: turkey dinner leftover casserole-- ha!-- and chocolate chip cookie pie with vanilla ice cream), and head to the Saints game in Canton.
The celebration kind of evolved into a 3-day party without any real planning on my part. I think it's a humorous reminder of the way his delivery evolved into a 3-day labor-- certainly without any real planning on my part!
Gabriel is a passionate and disciplined leader in the making. With those beautiful God-given tendencies at times comes weakness, but as he is learning to day-by-day yield all of himself to the Lord, he is growing into a young man I am deeply blessed by and proud of.
Pick-up ice hockey is the latest sporting addition in Gabriel's life-- made possible by the outdoor rink right down the road from us-- and I think his "trapper hat" just completes the look! Can you tell we live a mere 30 miles from the Canadian border?!?!
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