The highlight of Max’s birthday was in the last post here.

But the rest of it was pretty fun too.

He woke up for the traditional birthday breakfast early since Elle had summer school and Grace had volleyball camp and had to leave at 7.

Can you tell how much he is loved by those little sisters of his?
After all the hoopla and celebration of getting a driver’s licence, Dave and I took that 16-year-old of ours to lunch and shopping.  Now that is a rare, rare occasion.  
He’s not a shopper.  
Neither are we.  
But that boy needed some new clothes like nobody’s business and when you have to pay for your own clothes, you jump at a chance that your mom and dad will buy you some stuff.
So we did.

Exciting things like new Sunday clothes.
Did I mention the Sunday shoes we bought are size 15?  
Just wondering.
Oh man, I loved having that time to have him to ourselves.
Now, the next part of the birthday celebration involves some surprises.
Because is it just me or do 16-year-olds have to have surprises? 
Maybe it’s because I’m an Eyre that I think that (Eyres are surprise junkies), but I’m pretty sure surprises are part of the rite-of-passage.
We told him we were going to take him out to dinner, and that he may as well invite a friend to come along to balance out the boy/girl ratio (we knew who he’d invite and he was already in-the-know on the plan).
He was a little confused since he had asked for his fav. pulled pork sandwiches for dinner and figured we’d have a quiet evening at home.  I’m sure he wondered why all the girls were beaming and trying to hide their excitement.  
We all loaded in the car and took him to a Mexican restaurant (not the one he picked).  When we got there and it was filled with a bunch of our favorite family friends he knew something was up.

It wasn’t an Eyre-style surprise because we didn’t have any special way to tell him what we were doing once we were there (we had another surprise up our sleeves for that), but we finally let him know we were going the the Imagine Dragons concert.

His slow smile got pretty big.  

Here he is with some of the teenagers in crazy evening sunlight.

Let’s just go ahead and excuse the fact that I only brought my iPhone for picture purposes.

Our family has never been to a concert.  The last time I went to a concert I think I was 18.  We had heard from friends that this one was such a great family-friendly one and we love Imagine Dragons so we were in.

And it was awesome.

I have a video my friend took of Claire singing all the words and almost crying because she loved it so much, but I can’t get it to upload right now.

I think it’s safe to say we all had a good night on Max’s birthday.

Thanks Max, for giving us a good chance to celebrate!

The next night was his real surprise party.

Dave had the awesome idea of using our new neighbors’ pool for the occasion because man alive, it sure is set up for a party.  They were out of town and were so nice to let us have free-reign over there.

Here we are setting up…

Max had volleyball practice from 4-9, but Dave went and got him early.

Here are some of the boys waiting to surprise him…they didn’t’ want to waste any time…

We wouldn’t have done it during his volleyball practice but literally there was no other time we could do it and the coach was totally good with it.

There’s no way Max would leave volleyball without a really good excuse so Dave thought of a really good one:  He picked him up all worried and told him our neighbors got robbed and the police were questioning everyone who had been around that day (and Max had been at our new house across the street working his tail off with his new job of helping with anything that needed to be done through construction).

So he believed him hook, line and sinker.

He was wondering what was up when they got there and there were no police cars were around…

Then Dave took him around back where we all surprised him.

I wish I had the video of that too, because he was kind of surprised yet kind of horrified.

He is one that does NOT like to be the center of attention.

His eyes were as big as saucers until he realized this was going to be fun.

And it sure was.

He was fine as long as we didn’t make him blow out his candles and sing to him.

So we did that the next day.

But back to the party…

Although Max was mortified about being the center of attention, the girls sure were excited.

Such cute helpers:

…and a cousin and her friends came too…cuties.

I wish pictures could do justice to show how many kids were there playing volleyball, basketball, tennis, swimming, eating, etc.  

There were probably over fifty kids all helping us celebrate the big day.

Some of the last stragglers to leave:

Have I mentioned how much we love this boy?

…To the moon and back.

Forever and ever.

More about that back here.

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9 Comments

  1. you're making me want to move to the dessert so my kids can have some friends! we live in the bay area and i feel like there are just not that many kids around. so fun!!!!

  2. Wow, seems like Max had an awesome birthday! I wish I'd had that when I turned 16! (I can't even remember what I did and it was less than 5 years ago)

    All those kids of yours are getting so TALL! If you don't mind my asking, how tall is Elle now? Looks like she's catching up to you for sure!

  3. We took our kids (11 & 9) to the Imagine Dragons concert here in Boise. It was AWESOME!!! It was their first concert. I think I almost had more fun then they did. Did Niko Vega open for them? Did you know that the lead singer, that cool woman, is the lead singer of IM's wife? They have a cute 9 month old daughter who's on the road with them. Cute!

  4. Hey there,

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