My birthday (12.29) has always been during Christmas break, and once I started working it was easy to wrap it up into my vacation week. I've NEVER worked on my birthday. Ben has also always been off on my birthday until this year. His new job comes with only 5 vacation days a year, and those also happen to be your only paid sick leave as well. Being the holidays we couldn't afford for him to take unpaid leave. He did work a short day and we had a fantastic evening together...but oh yeah, this post is about his birthday not mine!
Anyway- every year I've had a work event keeping me from spending time with him except a few hours in the late evening after all was said and done. Preview days and college fairs in addition to my regular daytime schedule made his birthdays a little blah. Last year he came with me "on the road" to a little town in Southern Oregon where he spent an exciting day at our hotel while I chatted with students about their college plans, and then we went out to dinner at an Italian restaurant that left us both with stomach aches as we watched Two Weeks Notice back at the hotel until we fell asleep. Thrilling.
I started off a few weeks ago really wanting to figure out how to get him the day off of work without him knowing. I was going to get a hold of his boss and see if they could keep it a secret so that when he woke up in the morning I could surprise him by telling him he could sleep in...but with his job (as with most) he would need to know that he wouldn't be there, so I had to tell him that he should take the day off, and he did.
On Monday, the day before his birthday, Malakai sent him a lovely balloon bouquet that came with a rather large chocolate truffle.
Tuesday morning I made him breakfast in bed while he and Malakai played. As we ate we finished watching The Proposal, which we had started a couple days earlier but were unable to finish due to a fussing little mister.
Later that morning he played his xbox in peace while Kai napped and I decorated Ben's funfetti cake with rainbow chip frosting. I had never written on a cake before and didn't want to spend $4 on a tube of frosting that I'd use once, so I mixed some vanilla with blue food coloring and put it in a sandwich bag. My first attempt was terrible as when I cut the corner of the bag the fold made two holes instead of one. Luckily I tracked down a different type of bag and after messily transferring the frosting, ended up with this.
The spacing is a little funky because of switching utensils halfway through and going back to take letters off and rewrite them, but I'm pleased with how it turned out for my first time. And best of all, it tasted fantastic!
At noon Mema (my mom) came over to watch Malakai while Ben and I went out to lunch at a local brewery. It was so much fun to get out, just the two of us, for a casual lunch. We talked about our house hunt and our "must haves" and "it would be nice to have" lists. We had some amazing food, Ben had a cheeseburger (his favorite food of all time) and I had the halibut fish tacos. But before that we indulged in the cheese fries...
Ben's present was to choose a BBQ/Grill that we'd purchase at a later date, but would browse for that afternoon. We looked around at Home Depot and then headed home.
Full of heavy foods we crawled into bed and all three took a nap...for TWO HOURS. We surely didn't mean to nap that long, but it didn't hurt since we'd be up late that night. We quickly got ready and headed over to our friends' place for a little birthday dinner.
As soon as we got there we discovered that Malakai had a VERY messy diaper that soaked through all his clothes in the 10 minutes it took us to get there. Happy Birthday daddy :)
After the mess, we ate dinner and sang 'happy birthday' as Ben laughed at us.
Then the much anticipated event of the evening took place...the Season 6 premier of Lost. We are total Lost nerds, Ben is like a Lost encyclopedia. I won't say anything here in case any of you haven't seen it yet, but it was CRAZY as usual.
After all the festivities Ben said it was one of the best birthdays he's ever had, and with that I felt very accomplished.
Awe, happy birthday to your love! :)
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