Shout Hooray!

I had a birthday, shout "Hooray!" Do you know what the best thing in the entire world is? Having a birthday on a Saturday. In years past, I found myself expecting the kids to miraculously know and understand it's my birthday and be on their best behavior for me. Well. They are children. And don't really get the concept of giving mom a special day of rainbows, holding hands and getting along for once, so my birthday expectations for my children were never quite reached.

But on a Saturday! Oh! A blessed Saturday birthday. Guess what. It was all rainbows, hand holding and getting along -- at least from my perspective, because I let Jeff deal with all the kids' mischief on January 25th. And it was awesome.

Bonus -- I even got a hot breakfast first thing in the morning by the kids' only caregiver of the day.

And then I hopped online to decide where we were going to spend my birthday, and I was surprised to see Google had a bunch of cakes and candles for their page. "Oh look! They knew it was my birthday!" I joked, thinking it was for some other birthday related holiday, or the invention of the candle, or something like that. Well. I was quite surprised to hover over the logo and see a special message just to me!

Then I heard a honk outside, and Eli said, "I've been hearing cars honking all morning!" I looked outside to find a treat in my front yard from the Young Women leaders.

Then I requested the whole family sing me Happy Birthday. Eli covered his eyes like so, hoping to escape my only demand of him for the day.

We decided to journey down to Ikea for the morning.

As we were driving northbound on the freeway, trying to decide where to eat, I realized we were within 5 minutes of Schlotzky's! Well, I think we all know what happened after that.

Schlotzky's lunch. At the park. And I didn't even wear a jacket for the first half of our lunch. The weather was nice!

I got a nice walk in in the afternoon, and then we waited for the party to arrive!

I invited Kenz, Melissa, and their husbands over for a little Nintendo64 Birthday Party.

I like cake batter. It's one of my most favorite things on earth. But I do NOT like cooked cake batter. So since I didn't think my guests would have gone for us dishing up spoonfuls of cake batter for my birthday treat, we settled on our latest favorite dessert -- peach cobbler in our new dutch oven! Best birthday decision I made all day.

The bad news -- Melissa's husband is a state champion at Super Smash Brothers. Yeah. That's a real thing. So he kind of dominated.

And then we had the suspenseful battle of Eli vs. Joe. Better luck next time, Joe.

After Nintendo fizzled out, we played The Newlywed Game.

I don't remember who won, but it wasn't me and Jeff. It was probably these little love birds.

It was a fun night and a fun birthday! Thanks for coming, Kenz and Melissa!