We're Planning for a 2017 Wedding in the Sabo House

New Year's Eve was especially spectacular in the Sabo house this year thanks to a major family event/announcement: Ethan is getting married to the lovely Mandi Smith! Yes, she said yes! We were able to document not only the actual event, but some of the work that went into the "surprise" for Mandi. Ethan popped the question on a York River dock of a nearby residence after securing permission from the generous Sal Leone of Sal's Sicilian Pizza & Restaurant fame. Thank you Leone family!

Ethan lined a section of the dock with Christmas lights and he and Taylor built an "arch" fashioned out of a repurposed door frame fished out of the recesses of the Sabo garage ... an old closet door jamb has never looked so good and never been so useful! Ethan had a ton of help from siblings and yours truly on pulling off his big event. Taylor, especially, was helpful in creating the magical arch and Evie documented it all on camera. Without further ado, here's the pictorial!

Um, at least Ethan and Taylor had plenty of room in the garage to work!

Ethan and Taylor have always been real close brothers. Even when it comes to operating the compound mitre saw.

Professional craftsmen at work!

We know exactly what we're doing! Look at that cut!

Ethan with his wood building game face.

Hey Taylor, it looks like you've got things under control there so I'm just going to check the score of the Alabama-UDub game. 

Yep, go ahead and nail it right there bro. 

Carrying it across the threshold ... just about ready for painting! 

I'll let go and then you let go and we'll see if it stays up!

Whoa Nelli! She's staying upright!

Ethan: "Hey Taylor, you missed a spot."
Taylor: "Bro, the sun is in my eyes!"

The lads got the arch perfected and then Taylor and our friend who's visiting from Oregon, Parker Smith, helped him set it up on the Leone dock and get the lights strung up. MerriGrace got some music playing on the dock, where it was a wee bit breezy and chilly ... but things soon warmed up with the arrival of Ethan and Mandi.

Now that is some happy going on !

The young couple is something to behold but it's hard to take my eyes off that expertly crafted arch!

Awwwww. 

Well done son!

We're all so excited to welcome Mandi into our family sometime in 2017. She's a beautiful young woman inside and out who loves the Lord with all her heart and we're so thrilled for Ethan. The Lord is going to do great things through Ethan and Mandi! We love you!

The amazing thing I found down at my York River beach

The beach at Harbor Hills

At least a few times a week, perhaps more, I walk a few blocks down to the neighborhood beach on the York River at the end of Harbor Hills Road. I walk by a piney lot that a neighbor told me is the final repose of the bones of slaves resting in unmarked graves. I wonder if that's true. I have no reason to doubt, but I find it startling. And mysterious. I walk down a hill where on the corner is a house with distinctive Cape Cod-style siding that always reminds of something I might see on the Oregon Coast. It takes me back to the Yaquina Bay Bridge in Newport. 

There's a couple of spots on the road where I've encountered snakes. A copperhead once with its distinctive brown diamonds and then a long, skinny black snake another time. It's quite a journey down to that beach.

One time I glanced out my kitchen window and saw a summer storm had cropped up. I was hustling down to photograph the sinister clouds as they rose in ambush over the York River. I was nearly there to capture it all when the clouds unleashed their thunderous fury. I turned for home and ran, chugging uphill in a downpour as the pine trees bent around me, arriving home soaked, my ears ringing. I remember feeling quite happy I made it.

I'm drawn to the beach and it's dun-colored sand for the view, the peace, the water, the sky and the sun. It's a place to pray, a place to think, a place to ponder and wonder. I've been visiting the beach for a little more than two years. There's an inlet from the river that flows high and low with the tide and opens up into a long, narrow pond that's like a shallow natural harbor filling the low spot between two stubby hills. I suspect that's where the area got its name, as a harbor among the hilly bluffs jutting up above the York River, but I'm not quite sure. It's all silted in now and I wonder if it was once a place of shelter for boats, maybe back to colonial times. Who knows. Google doesn't seem to know.

The most remarkable thing of all has been how much the beach has changed in such a short span of my visits. The inlet's path changes almost daily sometimes. The wind, waves and tides alternately heap up sand and drag it away and the inlet's path and mouth has been altered steadily, moving farther and farther downstream of the river.

The changing path of the Harbor Hills inlet

I like to take my kids down there. When the weather is warm for a good part of the year they love to frolic in the little stream and catch minnows and small blue crabs. They don't notice the influence of the greater forces on that little stream. I imagine they're not like me, watching the stream carve out a path through the ever-changing sandy obstructions. Or noting how the new path of the stream yields little treasures, like a bed of colorful pebbles and stones that surprised me the other day. The pebbles, shells and even pieces of smoothed glass seemed so out of place, like they had been dropped there. I posted a photo of them on Instagram and said they were stars that had fallen out of the sky onto my beach.

Unexpected treasures, or fallen stars

As I've watched that little stream change course I've come to appreciate it. It always finds a path, no matter the barrier. I like to listen to it on its meandering track back to the river as it whittles away at the sand in its course, never relenting, always moving one way or the other depending on the tide. When it's warm out you'll find me wading in the Harbor Hills stream, sometimes alone, often with my kids and fishing for crabs and minnows.

Mostly when I get down there I see footprints. Several people like to take their dogs down there. There's people who walk around and I can see where they stop at the water. I wonder if they're like me. If they notice how the beach is changing. How it's captive to the fury of the storms that gather force across the mile-wide river. I wonder if they notice the unrelenting stream, the life of that little stretch of beach.

A daddy moment: My baby's breath and answered prayers

Julie doing what she does best

This is one of my all-time favorite photos of Julie. I think it captures so much of what I love about her. It's how I know her so well. She's just loving on a baby. There's more than a few of these photos around believe it or not, but this one just captured my heart. I think that's because there's a tenderness to it, on many levels.

You can see Julie's right hand is in mid-pat and little Seth is asleep, looking quite content and loved. The way babies should feel. I'm guessing he has a full tummy from nursing, judging from the blanket over Julie's shoulder. I also like how Ezra is in the background reaching out and has his hand on his little brother. Our older kids have always loved our babies so much. It's always been so sweet.

I had forgotten the back story to this photo until it showed up on my Facebook news feed today under one of those "Three years ago" notifications. Indeed the photo was taken three years ago and there's a story to it. It turns out little Seth was really, really sick. He had been suffering from a cold and had a fever.

The next day he was admitted to Children's Hospital of the King's Daughters in Norfolk because he couldn't breathe. He wasn't even two months old yet and I'm pretty positive a lot of parents can relate to the torture of listening to your babies struggle to breathe. I remember many, many sleepless nights when our babies have been sick and neither of us sleeps. Or we try and take turns sleeping while the other holds the baby. Rough, rough nights. And rough days to follow.

The day after that photo was taken, after what I'm sure was another sleepless night, Julie took him into the doctor. The doctor didn't take long to advise Julie to go home, pack her things and take him down to CHKD. Right away.

Seth having a rough couple of days at CHKD

He spent a couple of days, maybe three at most, at CHKD while they got his lungs cleared up. I remember driving down there late in the afternoons and spending several hours in the room with Seth and Julie, who didn't leave of course. I like to say she nursed him back to health -- literally. I remember driving home at night, saying prayers across as I crossed the James River on the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel, prayers that didn't stop miles and miles later as the Coleman Bridge carried me home over the inky night darkness of the York River 90 feet below.

I'm thankful for doctors and places like CHKD. We've spent more than a few days down there with various Sabo kids for various reasons. They've always taken care of us.

When the photo of Julie and Seth with Ezra in the background popped up in my Facebook feed it brought an immediate smile to my face. And as I looked back through the photos around that time three years ago and remembered the trauma of the moment, I thought how blessed I am by the Lord with all these healthy babies we've had. They've had their moments of illness, but they've always been relatively brief.

And I don't think it's so strange that I found myself missing those moments. Those times of holding a tiny little baby in my arms, snuggled up against my chest with his arms and legs all folded up and wrapped tightly in a blanket and listening to him breathe easily. And knowing that prayers are answered.

Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 1. `Hey Dad. Where Are You?'

Let's see...a Taco Bell run or this sunset?

Do you ever get to a late Sunday afternoon, take stock of your life, check your mutual funds, contemplate the meaning of life, wonder if anyone working on Wall Street who engaged in shady mortgage fraud and insider trading deals has a soul ... and weigh whether it's worth it to cook dinner?

There's something about fixing Sunday night dinner that I find particularly agitating. Even daunting, repulsive and annoying. And I'm a dude who loves to cook. I can't put my finger on exactly why I don't like to cook on Sundays. After shedding my pastor duties after church I tend to "check out." You might find me in the garage piddling around making a coffee table. Sometimes I nap. I might take a jaunt to the store and act like I'm shopping for the week's meals and blow it all on ice cream and non-essentials like fancy coffee creamer and crazy cheeses made in Holland. Does this make me a bad person?

I mean, I'm usually a pretty good guy. I recycle. I put my shopping cart in the cart corral in the parking lot instead of in the space next to the van, even in hard rains. I clean up the lint screen in the dryer. I yield in the traffic roundabout and stop for pedestrians trying to enter crosswalks. I buy Julie raspberries because I know she loves them even though they're really expensive this time of year. Really expensive like cheeses made in Holland.

So we got to Sunday afternoon just before 5 p.m. and there were all these kids looking really, really hungry. The thought actually crossed my mind to cook something. The other thought I had was that they wouldn't starve if they didn't have dinner. I mean, we have bread and peanut butter in the house. But then I'm not going to eat a p.b. & j sandwich for dinner ... so I was faced with what's known as a "parental dilemma." You know the one. Where you have to decide if it's in the best interests of your family to eat at Hardee's or Taco Bell. I had a hankering for a burrito so the choice was fairly easy.

I got the lowdown from everyone of what they wanted from Taco Bell, loaded Seth in the van and took off down the street ... except I glanced at the sky and it was on fire. It's a three-block run down to the beach from my house and my intention was that I would race down there while obeying all traffic laws, snap a sunset photo and then get to Taco Bell before my children suffered privation leading to acute starvation and other health-related issues.

I got to the beach, told Seth to sit tight, ran out to the shoreline, snapped a photo and ran back to the van. Piece of cake. Except I knew that the show was just beginning. It would be a monumental sunset because literally the sky was aflame ... so I fetched Seth out of the van and we frolicked on the beach while I documented our interlude via my iPhone. Yes, I had total disregard for the well-being of my family. Yes, I got a phone call from someone high up in the Sabo household who was surprised to learn I had not even made it out of the neighborhood.

But I got some killer clicks.

Seth gets photo-bombed by the sunset.

Ultimately, I made it to Taco Bell. No one in the Sabo house had starved. They appeared perplexed at how long it took for me to make a Taco Bell run considering it's literally a few minutes away. But hey, boy did Seth and I make some remembories, as Evie used to say when she was a little girl.

When Everything Is Right In The World

Striking a pose

It was Tuesday night and it was five of my boys and me. Again. The ladies of the Sabo house were off to women's Bible study, two kids were at soccer practice, one was at work and so it was the lads' night out. We made a quick stop at the True Value hardware store to pick up some supplies for my new found DIY woodworking projects and then headed for the beach at Gloucester Point. These lovely fall evenings (note the lads are in shorts & t-shirts and it's late October) are too alluring, too perfect not to enjoy with one of the last romps at the beach.

When we arrived down at the pier that juts out into the York River (you don't need a license to fish from the pier, which means fishing is better in Gloucester) the boys started hamming it up and I snapped some photos. Then we noticed lots of people with cameras around. A kindly gentleman ambling out the pier informed us that an Antares rocket was supposed to take off from the Eastern Shore and we should be able to watch it blast into orbit from the pier. It was 6:15 p.m. Lift off into the October sky was scheduled for 6:22 p.m.

Heading out for a better view of the rocket launch

News that we would watch a real-life rocket launch caused quite a stir among the Sabo boys. This was more than we bargained for. Are you kidding? This was really good news. Like, really good. You go to the beach trying to kill some time and you're going to watch a rocket streak into the night? For reals? Dude. From Gloucester Point to the launch site on the Eastern Shore of Virginia at Wallops Island, as the rocket crow flies, is about 70 miles -- it's double that by car -- so supposedly we would have a real good view from a safe distance.

I was armed with two cameras -- my iPhone5C and my Canon T5i -- and was really stoked to try the time-lapse feature on my iPhone. I figured that would be killer for a rocket launch. As we waited at the end of the pier, we encountered one variable that threatened to derail my photography efforts. Seth seemed intent on seeing if the water was still warm and kept leaning through the rails, even as Gabe wore him like a straitjacket. In the interest of safety I reluctantly herded my gaggle of Sabos back onto the beach. We still had an unobstructed view out over Chesapeake Bay where the rocket was allegedly going to streak into the nearly cloudless indigo twilight, but better yet, if Seth was intent on taking a dip at least we could fish him out before he got in way over his head.

It was 6:21. Seth was getting wet and was covered in sand, the four other boys were having races up and down the beach and some people behind us were getting the play-by-play of the rocket launch over some sort of hand-held device. It wasn't a Walkman, I know that. I was focused on the eastern horizon with my two cameras -- in between preventing Seth from becoming a mini-Jacques Cousteau. The people behind us, a mom and dad and two kids, started the countdown. The four Sabo boys slowed down then stopped to watch, their labored breaths mixing with the sound of the river washing ashore in tiny waves. Seth eyed the water.

Houston, we are ready for the rocket launch

The voices behind us got louder as the countdown got closer to one: "...three, Two, ONE! LIFTOFF!" We scanned the horizon, squinting intensely. My cameras were focused. I was prepared to blow up social media with our rocket photopallooza. We watched. We watched harder. Seth headed for the water before Gabe rassled him ashore despite his sharp protestations. And then we watched some more ... and then the cry from the dad behind us: "It exploded!" The boys looked at me. I shrugged. The boys went back to racing. Seth headed for the water.

I'm not going to lie. I was pretty bummed. I've never seen a rocket launch live, even from 70 miles away. The evening had taken an unexpected turn. It veered hard from your run-of-the-mill, ho-hum evening at the beach with five boys -- three, count them three, couples we encountered looked on in amazement at the collection of Sabos and remarked how full my hands were ... if only they knew -- into tantalizing excitement territory. I guess I shouldn't really be disappointed because just minutes earlier I had no idea I could have seen a rocket launch. But when the unexpected becomes even a glimmer of reality, only to literally crash to earth, there's still a sense of loss.

I've thought about this all day, actually. When the unexpected roars into your life, only to vanish seemingly as quickly. I won't go into details, but I feel a sense of personal loss on a completely different level. There was something unexpected that happened in our lives, only to be taken away. There's hurt, there's pain. It's not fun. I'm sad. I guess that's the best way to put it. Just sad. It's nights like these that I like to wander in to where our youngest is sleeping, in this case Seth. So peaceful. So beautiful. So perfect. Such a gift from God. I like to hear him breathe. I'll stand there and watch, listening to him breathe and for a little while everything is right in the world.

When Times Are Tough, Head To The Water

Gabe & Seth on the pier.

Yesterday evening was one of those days. I had a ton of things I wanted to get done and nothing was getting done. You ever had that feeling? Things were going way south attitude wise for me and so I loaded into the van the five boys who were left with me after everyone had dispersed to soccer practice, Bible study (for the ladies) and work. At first I had no clue where to go. The sun had just set but it was a beautiful evening, still 70 degrees.

We headed down to Gloucester Point beach. It's a five-minute drive and we walked on the pier until the wind kicked up enough to prompt shivers. It was lovely. Peaceful. Beautiful. Seth was enchanted by the water. As he trundled back across the beach the waves kicked up and crashed onto shore from a passing boat that sped by. He paused, watching and listening to the commotion and I could see him trying to figure it all out.

I grew up in the Oregon High Desert. Where the sagebrush and open range meet the piney slopes of the eastern Cascades Range. Snow melt water flows icy cold off of the mountains and is a precious commodity where I'm from in Oregon. The rivers are narrow enough to easily throw a rock across them.

Out here on the Middle Peninsula, we're surrounded by water. Big saltwater rivers that yield bountiful catches of crabs and oysters and fish. The sun rises and falls spectacularly across the rivers here. The white sandy beaches are play spots and we're close enough to the neighborhood beach on the York River that the kids can load up the wagon with buckets and nets and head down to the river to fish out minnows and crabs from the inlet that meanders inland.

I love the desert. I love the solitude, how the sky is so blue, how it's filled with a million bright stars at night and how you can see forever. I miss it. But I've been out here for a decade and remain enchanted by the water that surrounds us. If I ever were to leave, I know one thing. I would miss it.