My Favorite Day

Call me crazy, but my birthday is one of my most FAVORITE days of the year. I certainly don't mind turning a year older and I certainly don't mind the attention. It's fun to have a day that is all about me, so I try to do everything I can to enjoy my day. The day of my 35th birthday started out with some of my FAVORITE people. These are my gym buddies. Sherry, Tracy, Jim, Kelly (our instructor), Me, and Claire. These are the people I look forward to seeing at 5:30 each morning. They are my support and why I keep going. We all look like crap that early in the morning, but we all work our butts off and it is fun to start each day with them.
Next I got to spend the breakfast hour with my most FAVORITE people of all, my boys. Before heading out the door to school that morning, the boys each gave me a handmade card telling me how much they loved me and wishing me happy birthday. I also opened a few gifts that I had purchased for myself, some new hiking shoes and the Just Dance 3 for our Xbox! The boys were very excited about that one.

Before heading to work myself, my friend Sherry invited us to breakfast to celebrate my birthday. McDonalds is one of my FAVORITE places for breakfast because they have my FAVORITE hot chocolate and I love the fruit and yogurt parfait.

Next, I got to go to my FAVORITE job and hang out with my FAVORITE 5th graders...

And 4th graders!

I love teaching Math and going to school each day is so much fun for me. These kids are great and they made my birthday extra special. We had a little party in class and some of the kids even brought me in little gifts. They were just as excited about my birthday as I was.

That evening it was time to spend some time with my other FAVORITE people, my family. I chose to eat at Chuck-A-Rama for my birthday dinner, not because it is my favorite, but because it is Mitchel's FAVORITE. I also had coupons for free kids meals, and free is also one of my FAVORITE things . We were joined by my parents, my sister, and my brother.

We did do one of my FAVORITE things...EAT!

Then I was spoiled again with a few more gifts from my family, and being spoiled is my FAVORITE! So it was a great day. I feel very blessed to have the life I have and I love celebrating it with the people I love the most.

Beating the January Blahs

I usually hate January. I hate the cold and the snow and the non excitement of the whole month. But for some reason this year, it didn't bother me at all. Probably because we have been having unseasonably warm temperatures and hardly any snow at all. We've also managed to do some fun family things this month that has made it not such a drag.

We did get enough snow the first week of January for the boys to break out their sleds and go down our front yard a bit. I think this might be the first time they have used all their snow gear all season.

The next weekend, the weather was warm and beautiful. For Mitchel's birthday months ago, he got these rockets. Mike decided it was finally time to build them and shoot them off at a field next to our house.

We had a big countdown and then with much excitement, Mitchel pushed the ignition button....nothing happened. So Mike adjusted something and we tried again....nothing! We were getting pretty disappointed by then. Mike and Mitchel adjusted one more time before throwing in the towel. We counted down one more time and ....BLASTOFF! It was awesome. It shot about 40 feet in the air and came down nice and softly with the parachute.

We had three engines, so we were able to do it a few more times. Very cool!

Another fun activity was going to the Jazz game using the boys' Jr. Jazz tickets.

Of course our seats were way up in the nose bleeds, but the kids didn't care. The Jazz killed the other team (I can't remember who it was). The best part was that all the kids were really into it. Now that they have been playing for a while and understand all the rules, they are starting to love basketball as much as their Dad! (It also helped that there were free drinks involved!)

One Saturday, after all our Jr. Jazz games, we took the kids, along with G&G Harker to the train show at Thanksgiving point. I don't know what it is about boys and trains, but they love them. There were lots of cool layouts to look at. Our favorite was the Lego layout.

They boys even got to drive a few trains.

This past weekend, Mike got tickets from his boss to attend the play at Hale Center theater. We took everyone except Miles, and brought Mitchel's friend with us. I wasn't sure if the boys would like the play, (it was a murder mystery/comedy) but they all really did. After we went out for some pizza. Good times!

So January wasn't all that bad. In fact it was pretty great. Plenty of good time spent as a family!