Friday Foto Friends a little late...

Today was a wonderful day!! Not only was it much cooler and breezy and no rain, but my sister and her hubby traveled two hours to come and have lunch  and celebrate their birthdays with us!

Yes, you read that right. To celebrate their birthdays with us. Yes, they were both born on the same day, but two years apart. Their birthdays were earlier this week, but this was the soonest we could get together, and sadly, we couldn't have a big family party like we've always tried to do in the past, but it was just the four of us this time.

We enjoyed some time on the back porch after lunch, watching the birds and activity around Still Waters Pond. It was delightful, but chilly enough for me to put my sweater on!  Hubby too:

Then after our lunch had settled enough and we were getting too chilled on the porch (I know you northerners are laughing at us...yes, it was in the 60's here, but very very windy, which made it feel a lot cooler! Especially out by the pond), anyway, we came back inside to sing Happy Birthday to them and have cake and ice cream and strawberries!

Yes, there are two cakes. My sister always gets an Angel Food Cake, and my BIL always wants a Coconut Cake. So I got up at 6:00 a.m. and got busy and baked both cakes. (No wonder I am sitting here now at 9:00 p.m. with my eyelids drooping and I'm thinking I may have to finish this post tomorrow and go to bed. LOL)

Anyway, we sang Happy Birthday to them...

And then there was the "big blow", which somehow my sister managed to evade having her picture taken with her cheeks puffed out blowing out her candles...how did she do that??? She knows it's a family tradition to have your picture taken like that!

Oh well, here she is with her Angel Food Cake, and those flowers in the middle are tulips. The tradition is that our mother always baked an Angel Food cake for her and put a little vase of Daffodils in the center, because when we were little we lived in Pennsylvania and they had daffodils then in April.  But then we moved to Florida when we were still kind of little, and we could no longer find daffodils because they don't grow here. After a while the grocery stores started having little pots of them around Easter, and since my sister's birthday has always been close to Easter, we usually could manage to find some Daffodils in a pot somewhere. But not this year! They seemed to come out earlier this year, back in March, and no one had any available this week! I know because I checked everywhere!

So yellow tulips had to suffice!

And my BIL has always had a coconut cake, that usually my sister baked for him, but this time I did it. He said it was good.

He also wanted strawberries on his ice cream in a different bowl, so there you go...we aim to please here at this birthday party house! LOL.

Now in my post yesterday HERE, I mentioned something about buying some Daylilies to use for something special.  Well, if you looked at that picture yesterday:

You could see how pretty the daylilies were.  My thought was they kind of resembled daffodils and I could use those blossoms for the cake today. However, what I didn't take into consideration was that daylilies only bloom for a day!

And so today the blossoms were closed up and not so pretty. So that's why I used the tulips instead. But I gave my sister one of the daylily plants for a gift so she could plant it. She's the one with the green thumb in the family, as I may have told you before. Anything with a flower on it she knows what to do.

But even people who can grow real flowers sometimes still appreciate fake ones, and in this case, this is  a good example.  I found this lovely spring wreath at our son and DIL's store (Dixie Cottage in St. Augustine) and bought it for my sister's birthday present.

She loved it, as you can see.

We had a great visit and laughed and talked and enjoyed being together. We do not take these times for granted, because we are not getting any younger, and we've already lost our parents and one brother. We have another older brother still living up in N.C. , and we cherish our few and far between times together.  So any chance we can get together to celebrate LIFE, we do it!

Now, this morning I happened to look out on our front porch, and what did I see?

One of those squirrels out there apparently kneeling in prayer...or at least that's what it looked like to me!

He may have been praying that I would go put some more birdseed in the birdfeeder that he and his 8 brothers and sisters keep emptying every time I fill it within an  hour or two after filling it...I don't know,

but I just admit he is awfully cute.

On the other hand, maybe he is praying for our country, kneeling there beside our American Flag. We certainly do need the prayers...

While sitting on the back porch with the family we watched Mr. and Mrs. Bluebird come and go, feeding the babies in the birdhouse. Here you see them both, waiting for us to leave before they will go inside the house...but soon they just went ahead and went in because the babies were hungry and we weren't moving fast enough.

Not sure I'd want to be a green grasshopper or bug right now here in my neighborhood!

Well friends, it is getting late and tomorrow is another day. We are having a pot-luck lunch at our church tomorrow, so I will be up cooking again in the morning. Making meatloaf because ground beef was on sale this past week so I can afford it right now.  It will be a wonderful time together. We call it an "Agape Lunch", which stands for the unconditional, selfless, sacrificial love of God and for our fellow man.  It is a time of fellowship and thankfulness for all that God has done for us.

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son,

that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."

John 3:16

Amen.

Have a blessed Palm Sunday weekend.