My 26th Birthday

So yesterday was my birthday and it was a good day.  Ben took the morning off, and he did some deep cleaning, and told me not to do anything, so I relaxed.  Then he took the girls to run some errands, so I got to just relax.

Then they had me open gifts:

Autumn got me a lot of new socks, and I really really needed them (in fact I really needed them at my last birthday)  but they made me promise I would throw away all my socks that had holes that I had been wearing.

So I had to throw this pair of beauties out :(, but I can't complain because i have soooo many more new nice socks with no holes!

My mom surprised me and made this quilt and pillow for me, which I was really really excited about!  Check out her blog to see more detailed pictues.

Then when Ben got home from work we had some cake with the girls (my favorire german chocolate cake)

And my sweet girls helped me blow out the candles

Then my sister was so good to babysit the girls so that Ben and could go out to a nice dinner with some delicious food!  If you are in the Provo/Orem area I highly reccomend the food at Pizzeria 712.

Then we came home and found our girls in Bed and I got to enjoy my surprise gift from Ben:

which I was VERY excited about.  I didn't expect anything, because he had some money saved up and donated it to my rug fund (I want to get this very large rug for our front room, and it is kind of expensive, so I didn't expect any other gift, but he fanagled a way to get me another gift)

Then I just relaxed in bed and got to play New Mario, and then I got to watch Ben play the game and love it.  He told me if he had realized it was that fun he would have boughten a long time ago, so now we are going to have battles over who gets to use Ben's DS :)

So I thought my birthday was over, but then we got the biggest surprise at 5am (technically not my birthday anymore)

a very cute, but sick little girl, she had more sickness at 6 and 6:30.  Then we finally went back to sleep and slept in until 9.

And her very sweet older sister got her breakfast in bed.  What cute girls.

So now we are just going to take the day easy.  We are all hanging out in my bedroom.  We are all still in our pajamas, the girls are watching movies and I am going to catch up on some paper work that has been accumulating on my desk.

So that was my birthday, the end.

Yesterday

Eating gigantic icicles from the backyard

Making Mommy's birthday cake

Prairie dropping the recipe card into the batter

the damage to the recipe card

the cute girls getting readay for bed

The Vacation is Over

I know everyone is dying to see pictures from our tropical vacation to Puerto Rico in the middle of winter.  And I really got some nice photos, but I am a little depressed about the whole pictures thing.  On the third to last day in Puerto Rico, my camera mysteriously stopped working while we were hiking through a very humid forest.  So it turned out my camera was fine, but my memory card would no longer work.  I got a new memory card for the last two days, but one of the days I spent almost the whole day on a kyak, and the other day we were in the car a lot for traveling from the small island Vieques back to the main island of Puerto Rico.  Anyways, so my brother-in-law said he would look at the memory card to see if any of the data is retrievable, but until then, I feel sad of all the pictures i might have possibly lost.

But when I got home from working out yesterday morning this is what I found my family doing:

Ben asleep in bed

the girls eating pretzels and playing dominos all by themselves

It turns out that Ben did get up, helped Prairie go potty and then told them to play quietly and let him sleep.  

Snowy Day not getting us down

So Monday around noon it started to snow and it snowed for 30+ hours straight. We had quite the snow accumulation. When Ben got home from work he thought it was a perfect night to build a fire. So Ben and the girls built a fire.



Then as a family we got to all sit by the fire and enjoy it. Then even better, Ben put the girls to bed, I took a nice long hot bath, then snuggled up in jammies by the fire, while Ben shoveled the driveway, and I got to enjoy the dying fire and watch the magical snow come down into our back yard.


The best part of the evening....


enjoying the snow because I knew on Friday I would be in Puerto Rico with my swimsuits on a nice beach.

The snow accumulation