Thing the Second: Birthday

Just after we moved, we celebrated The Wife's birthday!  She very much enjoyed turning 23*.  Again, she wrote about this over at her blog too, which you can read here, but I wanted to document it a little at least too.

So Julie had a birthday!  And it was fun, despite all of my apparently natural inability to throw any kind of successful party.  After a completely and miserably failed attempt at getting a bunch of friends and family to join us for a viewing of The Avengers after we finished moving (Her similar plan was such an awesome post-birthday surprise for me, I thought it would be a fun bit of turnabout, and even though it was a couple weeks early for her actual birthday, think of how big a surprise it would have been!  Alas, 'twasn't meant to be), we thought we would end up just spending her actual birthday alone together, as it were.  This kind of defeat always requires a little bit of recovery time, but then after we had settled in and her actual birthday approached, we decided to risk another failure and throw a sort of birthday/housewarming event.  So we did!  And it turned out to be a success!  Although the pictures we ended up taking don't indicate such, there were quite a few people present, and we were so glad to have some company to introduce to our new place, and to have a bunch of people with whom to share Julie's latest confectionary masterpiece:

WHAT.

Hi, Halle!  Thanks for representing the guests present at this event.

Let the record show that I did offer to make her birthday cake for her, but as she has grown rather fond of (not to mention quite adept at) making cakes, she wanted to take the opportunity to try a recent discovery, the epic Chocolate Quake Cake.

As for the birthday girl and the actual day itself, I tried my hardest to lavish her with gifts and cash prizes throughout the day, but unfortunately, due in part to her birthday falling on a Sunday, and due in larger part to my own procrastination, but due in (maybe) largest part to Amazon's lackadaisical attitude toward shipping my items, her party was spread out over a few days and even a week.  It didn't help that she didn't have much clear idea what she wanted for her birthday this year, which I could understand.  Sometimes it's just hard to know what you want!  But I tried to be creative, and I even tried to string my present ideas together with some kind of theme like The Wife did for mine in March, and it ended up being, um, things that are rectangular.  Or something.  HA!  Works for me.  A few of them were these:

This is one I came up with on my own!  It was even available in pink.  I'm so glad she liked it, and now doing her Pilates will be much more comfy.

This is something she hinted at strongly a few weeks earlier, and then I think she kind of forgot about it.  Score another surprise for me!

So wonderful!  This came as a set with a voucher for a pre-ordered copy of the DVD as well, since for some hideous reason it doesn't come out until the end of June.  CDs are only slightly rectangular (in cases at least).

In the end, she seemed to have a nice birthday, and I vowed to plan a little more carefully for parties and presents and such in the future.  And then we also took a fun trip to cap off the birthday weekend/week, which is coming up here on the blog as the next Thing.  Happy birthday, Wife!


* or something