34

My birthday (34th) this year was really wonderful- truly wonderful!

Joe let me sleep in and at a lovely hour I was woken by happy birthday cheers from my sweet little family (and a bit of jumping and climbing on mama too)! Then Joe prepared a breakfast of homemade blueberry pancakes!

But wait, there is so much more!

The rest of the morning and afternoon I spent with my friends Steph and Rebecca. We went out for Starbucks, painted pottery, and had a rather late lunch at Olive Garden. I think that was possibly the most relaxing afternoon I have spent in quite some time- it was delightful! I think though that our favorite part was painting pottery. Oh so much fun! We chatted and painted and tried our best to get creative and we were there for 3 hours!! And quite honestly I enjoyed every second of it- there is something very peaceful about painting. Oh and we dreamed about the many more pieces of pottery we will paint together now that we have discovered this place!:)

I didn't get back to my family until about 4p.m.- just in time for most of Lily's ballet class (where I got to see most of the rest of my close friends here)!

Back at home Joe made dinner and my sweet little Lily was more than a little excited to have a little family birthday party for me! There was ice cream cake and presents. Oh, it was so sweet to see how very excited Lily was to be giving presents. In addition to some editing software that I wanted Joe and the kids also picked out for me some new lamps for our living room and new (lovely and soft) sheets for our bed (we really needed them)! The best was that Joe had already washed the new sheets and made the bed! I have this sweet memory of the four of us laying on the bed and rolling around on the new sheets (who knew a four year old could get so excited about new sheets)!

We ended the day by enjoying cake and time with our staff team (technically it was a meeting, but I love being with them so much that it didn't feel too much like work)!

Thanks to my family and friends for making this such a special, wonderful, relaxing, and fun day!

P.S. I am writing this blog post from my laptop at the Philly airport (during my layover)! This may very well turn out to be my most productive layover ever!:)