My birthday

I know this is bragging, but I have to do it. I seriously had one of the best birthdays ever. The BEST birthday ever considering the fact that most of what made it great was how many things my kids thought of all by themselves.

First, I woke up to a message on my bathroom mirror from my sweet Scott, telling me Happy Birthday (he gets up at 5 am for work and is nice enough to let me sleep through that every day!). I forgot to get a picture of it, and have already cleaned it off (which I'm really sad about because I usually leave his messages up there for weeks...) but it was happy to wake up to read that.

Tyler saw the message not long after breakfast, and that inspired both Emalyn and him to write me messages of their own. Emalyn wrote this, and put it up on my bedroom door:

And Tyler wrote this, and taped it (very securely) to the front door of our house:

This sort of freaky expression that he's wearing is his latest choice of a "smile at the camera" pose. Really odd-looking, I know.

Next, they both got out all the birthday decorations out of the top shelf in the pantry closet and put them all up for me. Then they wanted to make me a birthday cake, which I helped with. I've always thought you shouldn't make your own birthday cake, but it's so so so fun when your kids actually think to do it for you. It was really fun to help them with that.

In the meantime, a sweet sister from my ward brought me a rose, and at NOON Scott called to tell me he was on the bus, on his way home from work. That was the best surprise of the whole day!!!!!!!!!!

He stayed home while Krysta was napping and they worked on refinishing our canoe, while I got to go get my hair cut. It was getting way too long and really annoying me, so I wanted to chop it off. Apparently I communicated the "chop it off" part a little too well, because it's a bit shorter than I thought I'd explained. I'm not super happy with this picture, so I'm going to get a better one, but here's the finished look:

When I got back, we had just enough time to light the candles and have some cake before we took the kids over to my wonderful neighbor who volunteered to watch them so Scott could take me out for my birthday.

Yes, they actually counted out 32 candles and put them all on the cake. They had almost all melted down into the cake by the time they were all lit and I blew them out. But they were really excited that we actually had 32 candles!

For our date, Scott took me to the Olive Garden (yummy, yummy food) then we went and bought me new sunglasses and a new watch.

And that was the best day I've had in a long time... I am grateful to have such wonderful family and friends.