My 34th Birthday and SNOW (October 28)

I'm gonna put this out there: I woke up yesterday morning feeling every minute of 34 years old. I'm not sure if it's the pregnancy, that I'm not sleeping as well as I think I am (although, no middle-of-the-night potty breaks FTW!), no naps for the weary, chasing after two little crazy ones, or age itself, but I felt very, very tired and old.

However, it wasn't like that the entire day, and it was a pretty great one. I had a few of those ego-boosting complements at work that you never hear (one lady told me I was positively glowing, and another rough and tumble trucker dude told me I was very obviously pregnant because of "all that weight I lost beforehand", and that I "carried well" which I'm assuming is really just because of how nauseous I was the whole first trimester, because prior to getting pregnant, I lost all of about 3lbs, which in my mind isn't even recognizable to me, much less a random trucker - haha), so that helped.

I also found THE BEST pumpkin bar recipe out there for work treats, so how could a morning be bad when you've got some coffee and pumpkin bars? Answer: It cannot. ;)

It was one of those busy mornings at work, where I was out on the floor a lot troubleshooting, which is sometimes a nice break from the monotony of writing (or staring at) thousands of lines of code and/or debugging. Mark and I took off a half day, and made our way to Mankato for the afternoon around 11:30.

We decided to have lunch at Grizzly's (one of our favorite places there), where they SERIOUSLY hooked a birthday girl up! Not only did I get a free entree (Bear Creek Pasta - YUM!) for being part of their club thing, they also gave me a free piece of cheesecake. Not that they had to do that to bring me back in the doors again, but we'll definitely be back again :)

We mostly went to Mankato, however, to pick up the rest of the flooring pieces we needed to finish off our flooring (which is still sitting in boxes in our living room) and to return a football (since we ended up finding our other two, which we needed for pictures back on the 18th).

We also were hoping to find new phones, but the selection at Best Buy and also at Walmart for Verizon Prepaid phones was sadly very slim, so it looks like we'll be ordering online soon.

We made it back to town right around our normal time to pick up the boys, so we swung by to pick them up, then made our way home for a normal evening together (aside from the birthday festivities): Dishes, picking up, opening presents, leftover lasagna for supper, baking a birthday cake, Cashel to AWANA, birthday cake time, baths, off to bed.

Always the prankster, Mark decided that although my second gift is on its way (my 1st half of 2015 photo book I ordered the other day), I still needed to have two packages to open, so he wrapped up some diapers, and we were all laughing pretty hard about it :) But my "real" gift was a new pair of TeePee Creepers slippers. These are my FAVORITE things, and I had worn my old pair out way back in January, so I was desperately missing them. A HUGE thank you :)

Kendrick still doesn't quite understand the concept of birthday presents and/or cake being for the birthday person, so he had my one present mostly unwrapped before I even got to the table, and was pretty adamant about lighting the cake himself. ("I do it, Mama! I DO IT!")

34 years old!

We only had to light the candles something like 8 times after my initial blowing out the candles, since, you know, it looked like SO MUCH FUN that the boys could have their chance at blowing out the candles over...and over...and over again ;)

And, as is tradition, if it hasn't snowed BEFORE my birthday, it will snow ON my birthday ;) It didn't last through the evening, even, and it's supposed to be back into the 60s this weekend, but a first snow is a first snow!

I had a pretty great birthday :) And I can tell you this: Cashel is VERY aware of the fact that the next family birthday in our little family is HIS. And he has been inviting people to his party since July. (Just in case I was thinking we might escape the birthday party trend and maybe just do every other year). So, if not before then, it looks like we'll probably be seeing you all at the end of January (if I don't end up in pre-term labor from planning the party haha).