It was my birthday.

This month has flown by - full of birthdays, visits, baking, and work!  I'm thankful my Christmas vacation officially started at 2pm today, and my team from work took off a little early to see "True Grit," with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Josh Brolin.  Wow, thank you, and yum.  I was hoping to see more of drool-worthy Josh, but he was only in a couple scenes.  It was an excellent movie - I've never seen the original, but as soon as I got home, I put it in our Netflix queue.  Didn't think I liked Westerns, but if they're all this good, I'm in!

But back to December happenings...first, my mom came to visit for my sister-in-law's baby shower, and while she was here, we had a birthday celebration at Linda's to celebrate Nate's, Dave's, and my birthdays (is that grammatically correct?).  I was hoping we'd celebrate just Nate's birthday since he always has to share his birthday with us - especially since we were having another celebration for all 3 of us with our friends the next weekend, but Linda was so nice to make a separate birthday cake for Dave and me!  A german chocolate cake.  Yum.  She also made us delicious chicken alfredo.  Such a good cook!

Since my mom was here until early Tuesday morning, that meant I could spend my birthday with her!  I haven't been able to do that since they moved to Florida, so it was so nice having the day off to spend shopping and having lunch with my mom.  People might take simple things like that for granted if they see their moms all the time, but it was a treat for me.  I got most of my Christmas shopping done that day, as did she, and we had a yummy lunch at Firebirds.  She'd heard some buzz about it on Facebook and wanted to check it out since they don't have one anywhere near Florida.

The next celebration was the following Saturday night, planned by Bonnie and hosted by Joe and Sharon.  Bonnie suggested we get a shitload of Chinese food and everybody could eat what they want.  The "Gilmore girls" did it all the time, but I'd never considered that option in real life.  Apparently it was one of Dave's lifelong dreams - well, now he can check that off his list.  I suggested we base the decor on a funny episode of "The Office," when Dwight K Schrute and Jim are in charge of planning Kelly's last-minute-because-everyone-forgot birthday party.

Bonnie found gray and black balloons, and we blew them up just a little and tied some of them to white streamers, but just left them on the table rather than hang them up, in true Dwight scrooge fashion.  Awesome.  

We hung the sign I made :

And once all the Chinese food was gone, we had some cake:

I definitely won't be selling cakes in my bakery, but it worked for the theme 

of putting little to no effort into a rushed party.  :)

By the way, this is the inspiration for the cake, which looks much better.  You win some, you lose some...

Here are the birthday kids!

and an outtake:

After dinner and opening gifts, the girls played Scattergories and the boys played poker, as usual!  

After a while, I fell asleep and, as if we were at a 7th grade slumber party, that meant I needed to be harassed.  Really, boys?  

We're all another year older, but will always be 19 in our minds, I guess :)