my birthday.

after blogging about elijah's birthday...i realized i haven't blogged about my birthday either. a very important day indeed. :D so...as i'm sure you're all dying with anticipation, here goes. this will mostly be pictures...as i find it easier to tell a story with visual aids.

the morning of the 22nd dawned bright and COLD. it was downright frigid (by california standards). there was enough frost on the ground that if i squinted my eyes just right, it almost looked like snow. a very happy thing indeed.

we had breakfast over at john's parents house. honestly...i don't really remember what we had...except for the mimosas! yay! i love mimosas...yum.

looks like eggs and beans and probably tortillas.


oh. and coffee. always coffee.


then we played around at john's parents house with elijah for a while...he insisted on taking all the bows off the presents under the tree while i insisted on putting all the bows on his head. my very own little live present. :D

after elijah had destroyed nearly all the wrapped presents at his grandma's house, we took him home so he could help me open my presents...before he went down for a nap.

it was fun letting him do the honors...especially thinking back to what he had been doing last year on my birthday. namely: sleeping. oh...and eating. that's about it.

my mom gave me a little ladybug "dust-catcher" (as she has so appropriately dubbed items such as this one) that opens up to reveal a tiny little ladybug inside it (i think the point of the big ladybug is to hold things like rings, earrings, and such). elijah was enthralled by the baby ladybug and of course he wanted to hold it...but i wasn't about to let him do that...so he just got to look. that's what he's doing in the above picture.

you know you're pretty much an adult when you have only two presents to open, both are from your mother...and one of them, you wrapped yourself. (john's present was unwrappable as it was a set of activities and not a tangible, touchable gift. i'll get to that in a second.)

however. i was still spoiled by my mother...bless her giving heart. (love you mom!) and this is some of the loot i scored with the money she gave me to spend on myself. ooo...how i love opening a box from scrapbook.com! (even when i did the ordering...)

after lunch...it was time for john's present. he took me to downtown modesto to the new gallo center for the performing arts that just opened a couple months ago. it was a pretty big deal (the opening of the arts center, not necessarily the nutcracker). we got there just on time and actually got some pretty decent seats (though we paid too much for them). as it turned out, john had never seen the nutcracker performed before, so i had the fun opportunity to regal to him the story and the history of the ballet having seen it myself enumerable times as well as performing in it.

however, with too many years of ballet training, it was a bit hard for me to enjoy this local production as the dancing wasn't fabulous. they did a better job than i thought they would do, this being modesto after all. but still, i had to keep reminding myself to stop counting the floppy arms, non-pointed toes and unfinished pirouettes. finally, i just kinda blurred my eyes so i could still see the general movement and not the individual dancers and their mistakes. *sigh*

despite his face in this picture, he did enjoy himself.

this was supposed to be a picture of the new performing arts center, but john didn't completely understand my directions...so now it's just a cheesy picture of me. it does, however, show my very wintery, comfy outfit john's mom got me for my birthday (i picked it out, she just gave me the money).

after the performance, we headed over to my favorite downtown eatery, tresetti's. unfortunately for us, they didn't open until five pm (it was four when we got there) and a very snooty bartender informed me that the first table they had available was at eight. soooo...obviously...we went elsewhere. and after speaking with the bartender, i was more than happy to take our business to my second favorite restaurant in modesto, p. wexford's irish pub (they don't have a website, though they should).

it has great pub food (read: not diet friendly!), great beer and great atmosphere. it's usually jammed, but since we were there at 4 when only the old folks eat, we got a table right by the fire place. after eating, we considered hanging around to watch the football games on tv but we were both kind of missing e (who was at grandma's the whole time we were gone). so we finished our beers and headed home.

the rest of the day was uneventful...and not really worth mentioning in detail.
the day was a great way to start my 28th year (i turned 27 but adding my first year of life into the mix, my birthday heralded the beginning of 28 years on earth. make sense?) so...yeah. that was what happened on the 22nd of december in my little life. happy birthday to me.