Adam had his 14th birthday party yesterday. As has become our custom, he invited kids from school and church for a sleepover/gamefest, and everyone had a good time. He made his special cheese/salsa dip that Grandpa Al taught him how to make, and he asked me to make tacos for dinner. I’ve not seen three pounds of ground bef disappear so fast!
   Dinner was a raucous affair with some interesting discussions. At one point, they were telling math stories and even mentioning the point slope equation y= -mx+b (which everyone at the table recognized). Yes, Adam has made good choices so far in his friends.
   Yet again, we were not prepared with an adequate number of candles, so Adam resorted to what is now becoming a Hernandez tradition: binary candle lighting. Using only four candles, we light the ones and not the zeros. Cyndi yelled out “ok, who knows how to write 14 in binary?” and Adam quickly yelled out “1110!”. They tried to explain to their guests how this works, but they didn’t quite grasp it and chalked it up to “some Hernandez thing”.
   Most of the night was spent with the Wii and lots of yelling and cheering and, occasionally, arguing. I had told Adam earlier in the day that I was counting on him, at his age, to control his friends come bedtime. Usually, we say go to bed, be quiet, stop talking, etc. several times until we have to kick someone out of the room and make an example of them in order to finally establish silence, but Adam did such a good job of guiding his friends that none of this happened.
   Cyndi got up early and made them breakfast(French Toast!), and took about half of the guests to church while the other half stayed to be picked up by their parents. Here’s a couple of pictures of the mayhem: