Birthday Extravaganza

Honoring the 28 wonderful years of my husband's life was a multi-day affair. The fact that we were teaching class all day on his real birthday somewhat hindered the festivities. But not enough to miss out on eating cheesecake with chopsticks. Because everyone knows if you've never eaten cheesecake with chopsticks on your birthday, you haven't ever really celebrated being born.

These are some of the amazing staff and teachers we have at our English school. And yes, that is a map of America in our office. I have to admit that on not-so-hot culture days, I have gazed longingly at that map and all the places I wish I was...but thankfully, that hasn't happened in a while!

We had some of our American friends, the Winds, over on Friday night for dinner and birthday cake. Birthday cake that I made! No, it's not shaped like a car and it's definitely not a Martha Stewart recipe. Don't look too close or you'll notice that the cake is slightly burned. Oh well. That's just the facts of life...or the facts of a celcius-oven.

On Sunday afternoon, Kev & I biked to Dairy Queen for some ice cream and American-ish ambience. We listened to Aretha Franklin's "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" at least three times before we left. I guess their play list isn't very long. At least the ice cream was good.

Birthday fun took a turn for the worse on Sunday evening when I had attempted to plan a surprise outing for Kevin with some of our local friends. We were going to go sing karaoke at this fun place called KTV. Trust me, it's not the same as American karaoke. They were even going to give us a free fruit plate! But knowing that Kevin isn't huge on surprises, I told him a few hours before that we were going to go out one more time that day. He figured out where we were going and told me that didn't sound very fun to him. Oops! How many birthdays have we spent together? How little does it turn out I understand my husband? Our friends ended up coming over anyway and we played random games we used to play in college like Signs and Schlurble. It's amazing how much fun a bunch of adults can have with a balloon...

So that's how the birthday fun went down. Here's one more picture of the happy birthday family. (Beans particularly likes birthdays. It means she gets to lick cake crumbs off the floor.)