2013 Birthdays!

In the past couple of months David and I have both celebrated our birthdays so I thought it would be fun to share with you how we enjoyed our special days and what gifts we gave each other.

My birthday was in June and happened to fall on a Saturday. I was still busy preparing for my defense, so I spent much of the day working. However, David and the rest of my family did their best to make it a special day! I enjoyed a David-made french toast breakfast and later in the day steak tips, salad, and corn on the cob at my uncle Dan and aunt Purvi's house. I'm lucky because I share a birthday with my cousin Olivia - she turned 4 this year. Everyone thinks its a little eerie because the oldest and youngest grandchildren were born on the same day! My mom made me my favorite cake and both Olivia and I blew out the candles (she also had her own cake).

For my birthday, David gave me an awesome Lafuma down sleeping bag. I have been borrowing essentially the exact same sleeping bag from Christine for the past several years because I did not own a nice sleeping bag myself. Now we need to plan some camping trips!

David's birthday was just this past week and it fell on a work day. Sadly, neither of us had found time to go to the grocery store yet so breakfast was just toast. However, David usually eats breakfast alone before going to work because I sleep later than he does (lazy, right?) but for his birthday I dragged myself out of bed and we enjoyed breakfast together. For dinner we had chicken, veggie, and pineapple kabobs and I baked him a blueberry birthday pie as a surprise. It was a nice and relaxed evening for both of us!

David cooked the kabobs on our "new" Weber gas grill from Craigslist. We haven't posted about this yet, but David found this durable grill on Craigslist for just $150. Both David and I were unable to pick the grill up before the buyer sold to someone else so Grandpa John came to our rescue and picked it up for us. He even got the buyer to knock $50 off the price because the grill was in dire need of a good scrubbing! David has since put ~$50 into it to fix it up some. The grill would have cost $500-600 new, so we consider this to be one of our more successful craigslist purchases.

Cooking kabobs.





















The grillmaster!

Yum.

Happy Birthday David! He even got to sample the raw pie dough :) 

We skipped the singing because I didn't want David's ears to be permanently damaged with my horrible vocal skills. However, we did light candles and he did get to make a wish. 

I gave David a random spattering of smaller gifts that I kept thinking of during my defense prep. A simple reusable canvas lunch sack, a disposable underwater camera for our Hawaii vacation, stainless steel straws for smoothies and milk shakes, metal shirt collar inserts, "My Dog the Paradox" by The Oatmeal (a hilarious comic book of sorts), and a travel sized wooden cribbage board. I think one of his favorite gifts was the slide belt his sister gave him - instead of the standard punched hole belt this one has a ratcheting mechanism that allows the belt to be almost any size. He thought it was so super cool.

All in all, I would say we both had great birthday celebrations this year. Relaxed and family oriented, which is totally our style.