South Beach Goes to the Symphony!

Day 10 of South Beach was my little sis’ birthday…in honor of her special day, I want to do a shout out to Sandra, who has a fun, new blog starring my youngest nephew, Jacob, who is of course, one of the most adorable babies in the world.

Day 10 (also known as Friday) wrapped up a week of swim lessons for the youngest Horne, Acting Camp for our girl, and Wrestling Camp for the three boys. Whew, busy week! Who ever said summer was full of long, lazy relaxing days spent at the pool? Hmmm…maybe next week we’ll try a slower pace.

I got the harebrained idea mid-morning on Friday to take our kiddos over to Fort Worth in the evening to enjoy an outdoor concert put on by the FW Symphony in the Botanical Gardens. Called the hubby to see what he thought, and he loved the idea. We managed to surprise the kids, who had no idea about the evening plans. There were a LOT of questions during the car ride over. They’ve been to the Dallas Symphony several times, but we’ve never gone to hear the Fort Worth Symphony. The program was right up their alley, and part of the reason I chose this concert: all the music was from major motion pictures, including Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, and others. The music was really beautiful, and once the sun went down, there was an amazing laser light show set to the second half of the program, and the final piece of the evening included a fantastic fireworks display. Definitely a fun family night.

Supper was a picnic in the beautiful Botanic Gardens while we waited for the music to begin. I was so tempted to just drive through and grab food somewhere since the outing was a rather last-minute decision on an already-full day, but am thankful that in the end we managed to save money on eating out and stick to our diet.

For our meal, I whipped up two very simple salads which I packed into our cooler for us to enjoy. The first was a variation on an old favorite: Tomato/Basil/Mozzarella Salad with extra greens to stretch it farther:

Those little white things look a lot like marshmallows, but they are actually tiny fresh mozzarella balls! I used my favorite summer tomatoes: Camparis, which have a lovely sweet flavor. To these three wonderful ingredients i added some EVOO, splash of balsamic vinegar, sea salt and pepper, and a huge bunch of salad greens. All the various flavors melded beautifully together by the time we enjoyed our salad.

Our other salad was a Chicken Caesar which I threw together using a breast from a rotisserie chicken, a bunch of romaine, some gratings of parmesan, and a bottled Caesar dressing.

The salad supper was perfect considering the very hot evening, and neither of us were hungry at all after enjoying such wonderful fare.

What a lovely start to the weekend this was! My handsome hubby and my beautiful girl together:

Sweet boys chomping on supper while they waited for the performance to begin:

This cute little guy actually spent much of the evening in my lap despite the hot and sweaty temps!

He amused himself by trying to take the perfect self-portrait of the two of us…I deleted close to 50 of his “masterpieces” much to his dismay, but here is one that I kept:

along with one more sorta artsy-looking one:

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