33rd Birthday

I turned 33 on Wednesday.  Here's a picture Brandon took of me that night.  I was going to crop the picture so there wouldn't be so much going on in the background, but then I realized that there was a lot of stuff going on in the background of my birthday so the picture is an accurate representation of me at 33. 

I had a great birthday, but as I kept telling the kids, "when you are a grown up and your birthday is on a Wednesday you don't really do a lot for your birthday."

In fact, I was so busy with other stuff that I kept forgetting that my birthday was even coming up. Case in point, Brandon teasingly asked me, "So do we have anything happening on Wednesday?"  And in all seriousness I told him, "I don't think so, but let me check the calendar."  And then I laughed super hard when I saw that Wednesday was my birthday. 

I also kind of sucked at telling Brandon what I wanted for my birthday.  I ended up telling him that I really wanted more laundry baskets.  He told me that was a lame gift and that I should think of something better.  He did end up buying 5 new laundry baskets anyway because they are something we've needed for a while. So now we have NINE baskets and it's kind of amazing.  

Brandon also took the laundry theme one step further and fixed the heating element on our dryer.  It was going out and so doing laundry was becoming a pain.  He fixed the dryer the Saturday before my birthday and being able to dry a load of jeans in under an hour was a pretty great present.

While Brandon was diagnosing the problems with the dryer I was out buying what I really wanted for my birthday.  More clothes!  I spent several hours hunting through thrift stores and came home with 7 new shirts, four new pants, two dresses, and a pair of boots.  It's been a while since I went on such a large shopping spree and I'm very happy to have some more clothing options. 

Here I am in one of my new dresses.  This dress is MUCH cuter in person.  In real life its so trendy looking.  In this picture it looks like a cross between a pioneer dress and a paper bag.  I was kind of disappointed by how this picture turned out and so I didn't take many pictures of my new outfits. But I promise they are cute. 

Speaking of trying to look cute, this is me on Tuesday.  Tuesday's are my day off so they are normally super busy.  But this Tuesday happened to be the day of the Cup Scouts Blue and Gold Banquet so it was even more busy.  I needed to go grocery shopping to buy potatoes to make cheesy potatoes for the banquet, and I realized that the only time I could go shopping was right after I put the kids on the school bus.  So I got dressed in a hurry, put a hat on over my greasy hair, dropped the kids off, and then Veronica and I went grocery shopping.  Then we brought the food home, put it away, went Visiting Teaching, came back home, made cheesy potatoes, ran a thousand loads through the laundry, tried to put away as much laundry as possible, showered, picked the kids up from the bus, played with them went visiting teaching again when Brandon came home, and then went to the banquet.  I took this picture at some point during the day.  I was so happy when I could just come home and relax and the end of the day.

 I was pretty happy with my cheesy potatoes, AKA funeral potatoes.  I've never made these before, and I joked that I felt like this was some sort of LDS rite of passage and that I could now be considered a grown woman.  (BTW I mixed in red potatoes with the russet ones and I think that made these extra yummy.  Sorry Idaho, but I prefer red potatoes.)

 The banquet was really fun.  I could have brought my whole family, but it started at 6 which is when the day usually starts catching up with Derrick and Veronica.  So they stayed home with Brandon and I took Charlotte and Lydia to the banquet.  They thought it was really fun.  They were so impressed with the decorations.  And Charlotte laughed really hard during the boy's skits.

I didn't feel bad that I had to work on my birthday. After my busy day on Tuesday I was pretty happy to go back to work.  A desk job is way less work than all the responsibilities that come with being a mom.

At lunch I went for a walk and listened to a Nerdist podcast with Craig Ferguson as the guest.  I'm working my way through old episodes of the show so this was recorded in 2016, but I really enjoyed listening to it on my birthday.  Chris Hardwick, who hosts the podcast, is such an upbeat person, and has influenced my career choices in the past year. Craig Ferguson is hilarious and smart.  He was one of my favorite late night hosts so this episode was just a joy to listen too.  (There is a little bit of off color humor and language, so you've been warned if you choose to listen to the episode.)

And actually I want to talk about another podcast I listened to the day before my birthday.  This was a Nerdist podcast with JJ Abrams.  JJ directed The Force Awakens and Chris asked him something along the lines of "you've dreamed of directing this movie your whole life, what's it like to accomplish a dream like that?"  And JJ replied with a story about when he sold his first movie script and how he was surprised when he didn't feel different even though he'd become a paid writer.  And then how he was surprised that he didn't feel different when he saw his name in the credits of a movie.  And he said that no matter what he did he still felt like himself.  And so even though he'd done this huge movie he really didn't feel different.

Chris added an observation that it's a little bit like the movie the Karate Kid where Daniel was doing repetitive things that ultimately taught his muscles how to do karate.  Chris said that JJ's career was like that where he did "little" things like Felicity, Alias, Lost, Mission Impossible 3, and Star Trek that each taught JJ how to do new things.  So then when he was faced with directing Star Wars he knew how to do it even though he didn't know that's what he'd been training to do.  And that's why he didn't feel much different.

I thought about that concept after the podcast was over.  On the morning of my birthday Brandon asked me if I felt different.  I replied by telling him about the conversation between Chris Hardwick and JJ Abrams.  I said, "I think that's how I feel right now.  I don't feel different now that I'm 33, but when I think back to how I felt when I was 23 I know that I've grown up a lot."  I've done so much in the past ten years that has stretched me in ways I couldn't imagine. I've had 3 pregnancies, and 4 kids.  I've lived in 5 states (in five years), I've met hundreds of amazing people, I've lived without my husband for 9 months.  I've bought cars and found rental houses. When I look back over all of that I do feel pretty grown up.  But I also feel like I'm still just 17 and I'm trying to figure out life.

Anyway, enough about The Nerdist.  (Though if you are interested in who Chris Hardwick is I HIGHLY suggest listening to his story on How to Be Amazing.  It's one of my favorite podcast episodes ever.)   

When I got off work on Wednesday I was surprised to find roses and a candy bar in my car.  Brandon is so cute.  He stopped and dropped those off after he was done with school.

 When I got home the kids came running out the the house yelling, "Happy Birthday."  Brandon had 10 more roses in water at home and the kids were telling me about how they had helped trim the flowers and put a bow on the vase.

Brandon had a seven layer dip made and we had that for dinner.

 Then the kids gave me some presents they'd made.  These were pictures Lydia drew.  Brandon also gave me the Wonder Woman DVD.  (That's what I'd told him I wanted after he told me that laundry baskets was a lame gift.)

 Veronica kept saying "Happy Birthday Mama" and it was so cute that I had to get a recording of it.

 After dinner we had root beer floats.  Brandon was super busy with school and I knew he didn't have time to worry about a cake this week.  So told him I just wanted Root Beer Floats.  And then I realized I think I like those better than cake anyway.  As you can see Derrick was ecstatic about the ice cream.

 I have to mention another gift I got.  A few weeks ago my parents asked me what I wanted for my birthday and I couldn't think of anything at first.  (This was back when laundry baskets was still at the top of my list.) But later I remembered that I really wanted a copy of The Book of Mormon Family Reader that I saw at Deseret Book.  Ever since school started this year we've really struggled finding a time to read the Book of Mormon as a family.  The kids have to be out the door for the bus by 7:25 so mornings are just too rushed.  And by bedtime the kids (and parents) are too grumpy.

Over Christmas we started doing a little advent calendar where we would read about the different people in the nativity each night.  We would read about the people at dinner time and the kids seemed to pay attention really well when we did that.  So I started to think that dinner time would be the best time to do our family scripture study. After all it was the one time each day that we were together as a family but not rushed. But I didn't like the idea of pulling out the Book of Mormon and reading a whole chapter. I liked that this book advertised itself as having "Select Passages and Discussion Prompts for Five-Minute Family Study."

My parents bought it for me and we started reading it as a family that night.  At first the kids were kind of resistant to it, but when they saw how short the passages were they warmed up to the idea.  Soon Lydia was bringing it to me at the dinner table and asking to read the day's passage.  And then Charlotte started doing it too.  We've all really enjoyed the book and I HIGHLY recommend it if you are looking for a quick way to do scripture study with your family.

Brandon's school schedule is set up so he takes one class for 3 or 4 weeks takes a final and then moves onto the next class for the next 3 or 4 weeks.  It just so happened that he was coming to the end of a class this week so he was swamped with studying for the final, putting together a notebook, writing a paper, and finishing all his tasks in the workshop.  That means he spent the rest of my birthday studying.  He was pretty stressed (and ergo grumpy) the next two days. This class has been on metal working which Brandon has never done before.  He was really struggling for a while.  His mood was giving me flashbacks to when he was studying in Army flight school.

I was so happy when he sent me a text on Friday saying he'd passed his final.  That meant I would have a relaxed, and fun husband for the weekend.

On Friday night we watched Wonder Woman with the kids.  I thought it would be fun, but instead I felt like we had to keep explaining the movie to the kids.  And it was so long. Really we should have skipped ahead to the parts where Diana kicks trash and the Wonder Woman Theme plays.  That would have been more fun for all of us.  I told Brandon we need a new movie night rule, All movies have to be under 90 minutes.

Oh and I have to share the How It Should Have Ended video for Wonder Woman.  Brandon and I watched this the other night and I laughed so hard.

Saturday was another one of those wonderful days where we had nothing planned.  Big projects for the day included helping clean our church building, cleaning our house, getting Valentine's Day cards put together, and laundry.

We also ate my birthday cake.  Brandon made me a Better than Sex Cake.  We didn't tell the kids the name of the cake.

And I made sure that I FINALLY got caught up on the laundry.  Normally I have a pretty good laundry system, but having the drier out of commission while Brandon fixed it really backed things up.  Add in the fact that we are trying to night potty train one of the kids and we seemed to have A LOT of extra laundry this week.  But finally at  11:05 on Saturday night it was ALL washed, dried, and put away.  Whew.  (And if you want to know more about my laundry system you should read this post about how I do laundry. I've changed a few things as the kids have got older and as we've moved, but it's still pretty much how I do things.) 

And that brings us to today.  We are now 3 days away from my favorite holiday - Valentines Day!  We spent today getting ready for some of the things we are doing this year.  The kids and I are all really excited.  

I'll tell you all about it in the next post.  

Thanks for reading.  

PS, I've started writing posts about Yellowstone on www.51centadventures.com.  So please take a minute to pop over to that blog and see what's new.  And if you wanted to share or pin any of my travel posts I would consider that one of the best Birthday Presents ever.  Thanks!