Saturday was Chelsea’s sixteenth birthday. Our normal birthday celebration is to grab a friend or two and go to an amusement park – SeaWorld and Magic Mountain have been past year favorites. But she’s sixteen now, so socializing is more important than entertainment, and she opted to invite more friends and go to the smaller-scale Belmont Park in Mission Beach.

I suppose I could have just dropped her and her friends off and come back and picked them up later, but some of them were younger – at least one was fourteen – and I had several parents express gratitude that I was going, too. To be honest, it never even occurred to me not to go. So I went, taking Boo with me, and I spent the afternoon wandering around the place with Boo and frequently running into the teenagers. We did all get together for lunch – pizza, of course. Boo seemed to have fun, too. He was excited to be around so much bustle, but behaved himself pretty well. We rode on the carousel together, and he seemed a little nervous when he was on the ride, but later seemed fascinated as we passed by, so I think he liked it. I was finally able to get him to go down for a nap in his stroller by walking up and down the boardwalk. Chelsea appeared to be having a wonderful time.

We broke down and got her a cell phone for her birthday. Changing our plan around to accommodate her was a bit more expensive than I expected, but I opted to get lots of monthly minutes rather than try and squeeze in under the wire. I was thinking that she wasn’t like a regular sixteen year old girl, and that she probably wouldn’t use it much, but when she found out weekends were free, I didn’t see her for a couple of hours, and she must have had the thing glued to her ear the whole time. **Sigh!**

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends at 08:02 PST

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