Zoë's 10!

Zoë woke up early on Friday morning and convinced Grandpa and Darla to take her and Alexander to play pickle ball. So by the time I saw her she already felt like the luckiest girl in the world. 

After breakfast we headed down to the beach, where we found so many creatures. Brown comb jellies, sand fleas, clams, fish, crabs...animals were everywhere.

Here's Zoë pretending to pop a clam into her mouth:

And here she is holding a sand flea:

Playing raquet sports was reportedly her favourite part of this beach trip. Here she is playing surfminton (or paddle ball or whatever you call it) with Grandpa:

On this particular day we (finally) ventured down to a little tide pool of sorts, where a sand bar rested between the pool and the gulf. It created a lovely calm area for little kids to play—the waves would crash onto the sandbar and then gently ripple into the tide pool. It had a bit of a current to it, running along the beach, so the kids joked that it was like a "lazy river" attraction. Here's Zoë sitting in the pool:

This lucky child—being born over Memorial Day weekend—has celebrated several birthdays at the beach! This year she wants a birthday party...she's never had one. I fell off the birthday party wagon when COVID hit and I haven't been able to jump back on. But I'm going to try to pull something together in the next couple of weeks. 

We didn't make a cake for her at the beach this year, since she's planning on having cake at her birthday party. Instead we bought cupcakes.

Here's a view of everyone getting ready to sing to Zoë:

And here's another view of everyone else getting ready to sing for Zoë:

Andrew got these huge long matches to light the grill one night when we did hamburgers and hot dogs for dinner. They worked just fine for birthday candles as well!

Zoë blew all the candles out except for one, which she had to go back for:

After dinner we went to the beach for a sunset walk. Darla brought glow bands for the kids to wear (just like last year).

Here's Zoë with Alexander:

Here she is showing off a spiny jewel box she found:

She used her glow band as a halo for several pictures:

I hope she had a good birthday, even if it was pretty low key. We didn't even bring any presents for her to open at the beach! Instead we opened presents on Sunday.

Zoë wore a beautiful pink, twirly dress on Sunday. She looked so cute I asked her if I could take a few pictures of her in it. She did a lot of spinning in it...

And then she wanted some pensive pictures on our garden bench (it's new-to-us from my friend Janelle; our beautiful red bench got all rotten so Benjamin tore it apart and when Janelle saw it was gone she offered up a bench from her backyard that she didn't want anymore):

We also checked in on the garden, which is mostly just a chaos garden this year (aside from a few tomato plants that I put in specifically). We squashed a few squash beetles, and found this rather large snail:

For her birthday, Zoë requested (rather generally) "more fox stuff," some LEGO Friends building sets, and a water bottle. 

Phoebe brought down Zoë's fox cowl—from Halloween a couple of years ago—so that Zoë could be a fox while opening her presents.

She ended up with a LEGO Friends building set, a fox water bottle, and a fox purse from our family. My sister Kelline sent a skipping toy for her. And she got some money from grandparents.

It was a fun couple of days celebrating Zoë...and we're not even finished yet!