My Birthday at Jupiter Lighthouse--Adventuring With Jesus and Jonathan

It is a good thing to be able to find joy wherever you find yourself!

When, after discovering a steal of a deal on airfare to Florida, Jonathan asked me if it would be okay to schedule a Mission Helps trip over our birthdays again, I only hesitated for a moment.  I could think of places I would rather spend my birthday than Florida, but I wasn't going to miss a wonderful chance to accompany my husband on another Mission Helps adventure! 

And, boy, did it EVER turn into an adventure!!!!!

An upside down adventure, (as I explained in a previous post) where some things were anything but blissful, but an adventure nevertheless!

And I had NO idea I would get to actually visit a LIGHTHOUSE, either!

Danny has been doing a unit in his Bob Jones English that has spent pages and pages telling about different lighthouses in the world while he has to work on grammar in those sentences.

(That is something I've enjoyed very  much about using Bob Jones English for Danny these last couple years, the wealth of interesting information in the books about interesting subjects.) 

We were becoming very intrigued with lighthouses and I was wishing very much to visit some!

And didn't the Lord permit it as a WONDERFUL surprise for my birthday!

(Along with other surprises!)

I think the Lord is soooo sweet and good to us when we surrender our lives to Him even when the circumstances around us turn upside down. 

We had celebrated both Jonathan's and my birthdays together the night before we left, since we'd be gone over both of them. (Our birthdays are three days apart, so we are the same age for three days!)

The girls made me this delightful orange icecream cake that I had wished for.

We tweeked a peppermint icecream cake recipe and substituted orange concentrate and orange cream icecream and oh, it was finger-licking good!

I had JUST recovered from several days of flu, and hadn't eaten much for three days, but I was able to eat this cake made with rice krispies and icecream.

 Of course, Jonathan wanted his very favorite peanut butter pizza complete with marshmallows and chocolate drizzle.  Sooo-don't follow our terrible example, but we had TWO desserts for supper that night!

We had also made Jonathan his very favorite bacon-wrapped jalapenos with the six poor old jalapenos I found in the frig. (Don't ask me how old they were, but when you live this far away from stores, and you've been sick for days, you don't just run in every time you need a missing ingredient or fresher food.)

The children made our birthday celebration so sweet. I was so happy for these violas that the girls gave me.

My dear 8-year-old Hannah knitted these for me--a new dishcloth, two scrubbies, and three darling little butterflies!

She also made these simple little paper tulips--out of her own head, no pattern.

I was awed at her creativity!

Jonathan apologized for not having his present wrapped, but how do you wrap prickly rose bushes anyway?

Rosie had this gorgeous basket of red-white-and-blue gifts,

including these,

and this homemade patchwork hotpad!

Birthday breakfast included a few leftover slices of bacon, fried eggs and toast.

This is what our front yard looked like the morning of the day we flew to Florida.

And so, skipping over a couple days of long hours and dirty work, here we are heading up the hill to Jupiter Lighthouse, which is just a few miles from Hobe Sound.

We took off from work in time to make the last tour at 4:00. That was the one small thing I asked for during this trip. The whole rest of the time was devoted to the work project and Jonathan doing things the boys wanted to do, so he made sure we could do this one special thing together for me.

I don't enjoy heights at all, but I managed to climb the 100 spiral steps behind Jonathan and I crept out on the platform going around the top of the lighthouse to look at the scenery with the guys.

A little distance away, we watched the drawbridge going back down after letting a boat through.


We also watched hundreds of boats, including a Sheriff boat and a Coast Guard boat which had some other boat tied between the two of them. We wondered what had happened, but the boys think maybe the engine had quit in the third boat.

I asked Jonathan to go ahead of me down the spiral steps, which were made of grating, and which you could see through to a hundred feet below, if you made the mistake of looking down.
I did not look. I hung onto the railing with both hands and looked at Jonathan's shoulder the whole way down.
His shoulder is a great thing to look at, but so is this replica of the 100 gallon oil barrel that they used to use at the lighthouse.

Outside, down about 39 more steps, is this huge spreading Ficus tree.
It is just one tree. Jonathan read that this species of tree can grow to take up many acres.

 Lots more pictures of the trip coming up, but right now I need to get back to school and work!