However mundane the week was, Saturday sure made up for it!
I had laid down the gauntlet for Mark early this year. I said that since I was turning The Big Three Oh, that I’d really like to have a party. A good party. The kind of party that would last me the next ten years until I had another significant birthday. No pressure though. Just the most awesome party ever.
Man oh man did my man deliver! He knew that there was no way he’d be able to keep it a secret, so he didn’t try. He let me know when it would be and that he was hosting it at our house. I knew of a few people who were coming because they asked me to let Mark know they’d be there, but I didn’t even have a clear picture of the guest list. Aside from that, I was left completely out of the planning and preparation.
Mark planned for potluck finger foods, telling all the guests that since I couldn’t eat much at one time, we would all be “eating preggo” and munching away all evening long. He enlisted my amazingly talented friend Ashley to help with the decorations. He got my favorite cake, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting, from the best bakery in town. Finally, Jan brought the headwear. You’ll see what I mean when you get to the pictures.
I couldn’t have planned a better way to spend my last evening in my twenties. I was surrounded by dear friends and sparkling conversation. Mark’s attention to detail made me feel cherished and loved. After we all finished our cake, Mark said a few words about how grateful he was that my heart defect was found and healed so many years ago. The surgeon told me that he was certain that I would not have lived past my early twenties if the hole had not been repaired.
Thirty is a tough birthday for a lot of people, especially women. I have to admit, it’s still a little surreal to think of myself as having moved on from the decade that saw me graduate college, marry, move to our dream location and become a mom. But given the alternative, I’ll gladly, gratefully take thirty any day.
Here are a few highlights:
Gorgeous decor as provided by my amazingly talented friend Ashley.
Biggest. Cake. Ever.
Mark trying to keep the candles from burning off his eyebrows. And yes, they put A-L-L 30 candles on there!
Me desperately hoping that I'd actually blow out all 30 candles. I did, thanks to the lack of oxygen at 9,000 feet!
Me, Tiffany (left) and Jan (right). Jan, of course, supplied the festive headgear. Who else has headgear for 20 people readily available in her prop closet?
The decorations in the daylight. One of the best presents I got that night was that Mark made sure the house was immaculate after the party. That guy really knows me.
And last but not least, the best photo of the night. Possibly the best photo my husband has ever taken...
Yep. That would be our good friend Mark, the music minister at our church, super stoked that he managed to score the Tinkerbell mug for his spiced cider.
Needless to say I had an awesome birthday. :-)
The evening of the 6th, Jan was hosting a surprise 40th birthday party for her husband, Jason. (Yes, that would be the same day that she hosted my shower.) See? I told you she was a busy girl! It was held at a fantastic local restaurant a little west of town. We’ve only eaten there once before since it’s out of the way for us but the food was delicious! About twenty people total were invited and we were so excited to be included.
Jason was genuinely surprised, which was a fairly big feat in itself. The cake that the restaurant provided for dessert was an enormous, double-fudge chocolate, chocolate something or other with chocolate frosting. Needless to say, I was in Heaven.
We capped our evening of partying like rock stars by hanging out and chatting at a local lounge for another hour or two. I’m pretty sure it was the latest I‘d been out since Norah was born. Thank goodness for a Grammie who doesn’t mind keeping her overnight! We made it back home around 12:30 and were in bed by 1:00. Fortunately it was the night we set our clocks back, so it didn’t do quite the damage that it otherwise would have to our Sunday morning routine. Still, considering that I attended not one, but two Jan-hosted parties in one day, the subsequent exhaustion was well worth the fabulousness.
Stay tuned for my final and most awesome party recap tomorrow!
On Saturday the 6th, Jan hosted a lovely Christmas themed baby shower for me. Of course, I was having so much fun with my friends I completely neglected to take any photos. I’m going to try to steal some from another friend, Jill who at least managed to get some shots of the décor.
They say that everything is bigger in Texas and Jan, native Texan that she is, does Christmas up good (as I imagine they say in the south). She only “counts” the Christmas trees that are more than 6 feet high because “the little ones take no time at all to do anyway”. But there must’ve been six or seven full-sized trees plus all the little ones tucked into various corners of the house. There was a rubber ducky and toothbrush tree on the kids’ bathroom counter, a tree for each of the three boys in their rooms, two four-foot-tall trees in the master bedroom decorated entirely in pink in addition to the full-sized gold and white clad tree in the opposite corner. One of my favorites was her newest addition, a three-foot tall white tree made of feathers and decorated entirely in glittering white butterflies. She has a tree for each major place the family has lived, China, Texas and Colorado. I could go on but seriously it’s too much to recount.
And I haven’t even started on the food yet! Jan prepared all the food herself, and it was delicious. The Coffee Punch (basically coffee with three bags of sugar and an entire carton of vanilla ice cream) was a hit, naturally. There were all manner of finger foods, sweet and savory, perfect for a nearly constantly hungry girl with very little room in her belly for food to nosh on.
I found out at the end of the gathering that she’d never hosted a shower all by herself before. Coudla fooled me!! She did an amazing job, and she was only half done for the day (more on that in the next post). I was so grateful to spend some girl time with good friends. Jan provided the perfect, festive and relaxed atmosphere with (here’s my favorite part) NO SILLY SHOWER GAMES!! It was a great time just catching up with people who I see far too seldom. And I truly felt showered with their love.
For those of you who read Jan’s blog, you’ll notice that I’ve stolen her recent title and appropriated it for my own use. Of course, there are two less parties in my title, since she had five in one week and I only had three. Hummph. But being as I spend at least a minute or two every morning trying to figure out how to roll my ginormous belly out of bed without shifting the axis of the earth, having three parties in one week still makes me feel like a rock star.
I started his month with the best of intentions - I really did! November is always a crazy month for me. As soon as we hit Halloween, things don't seem to slow down until about February. In fact, since the last few weeks of pregnancy slow time to a crawl and my typical holiday season flys by at light speed, I'm really interested to see if by having both events at once they manage to cancel each other out and allow time to move at a normal pace. I'm not holding my breath, but I'll keep you posted.
Anywho, my typical blogging time is Thursday while Mark is at band practice. Norah has a full day on Thursdays so we eat dinner at my parents, Mark heads to practice and I take her home for an early bedtime. Sometimes it’s the only two-hour stretch that I have to myself all week. Ever feel that way?
The past few weeks the weather has been uncooperative. Since I don’t have snow tires on my car yet (an issue we will remedy very soon thanks to an incredibly generous birthday gift from my in-laws!) I have been waiting at my parent’s place for Mark to pick us up in the truck so we can carpool home. I love spending time with my family relaxing in the evening, but not having those few minutes alone on Thursdays has reminded me that even for someone as social as myself, time away is precious. I feel like I haven’t been able to organize my thoughts the way that I normally do. This is compounded by the fact that, at 35 weeks along, I’m less able to complete a given thought at any time anyway.
We’ve been very busy these past few weeks and I have a lot to catch up on. I’m going to try to put it out there in little snippets a couple of times a day so that it doesn’t feel like drinking from a fire hose of Jones Family info after a more than two-week drought.
