Belated birthday

January 3rd, Adam ~who shares a birthday with a lot of people I know and adore~ turned 15! I have a lot of favorite memories of Adam. He's just one of those people who does funny things without trying to be funny but he's hilarious. Sometimes it's only funny later--like one day I needed to go somewhere and take all the boys. I told them to get their shoes on and Adam couldn't find his. We all pitched in to help him look and for 45 minutes scoured the house. It was a small house, just 900 square feet, so we knew his shoes couldn't have gone far!! Plus, he'd had them in his hands not long before. We looked in all the obvious places and it finally hit me to look in a not-so-obvious place. The fridge. I opened the fridge door and there they were. Go figure. A lot of our memories of Adam have to do with the fridge. Those who used to visit our house in Dallastown, PA can probably remember that we used to bungee-cord our fridge shut because we had a hard time keeping Adam out of there. He wouldn't just eat the obvious stuff-he'd drink ketchup, drink salad dressings, stick his fingers in the butter, things like that. (Are you catching on that the "obvious" doesn't always apply to Adam?) He figured out, though, that he could open the door a little bit and stick his arm in, so there was a circular path his arm could reach that he still wiped out at will.
One time when he was just 5 years old, Ken and I went out of town. Friends of ours stayed with the boys and took them to Baltimore, MD to the National Aquarium at Inner Harbor. Adam was with me later that week when I took our friends to the airport and we got lost in Baltimore on the way home. We were somewhere near Inner Harbor and I was driving in circles, basically. Then Adam said he remembered going past a certain landmark with Kathy and Max a few days ago and said "to get home, we went that way". I followed what he said and sure enough found I-83 and our way home to York, PA. What a memory!!

15 things I love about Adam:

1. his smile
2. his heart
3. his sense of adventure
4. his sense of humor
5. his singing
6. his willingness to help others
7. his natural curiosity
8. his sense of justice
9. his loyalty
10. his kindness
11. his strength
12. his willingness to try new things
13. his memory
14. his company
15. everything :)

I know it's late, but HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ADAM!