Thirty-One

Hey, look, an etire page of photos of my birthday and no photos of me! Figures.

It was a lovely day with my family. I didn’t have to cook, I didn’t have to clean (much), we did lots of fun stuff and the whole day left me with a gently happy feeling. It was good.

We ate our traditional breakfast at The Bagel Bar which is the BEST bagels in all of San Diego. The kid behind the counter asked if we were there on vacation at which I did my best not to laugh at him and then I told him about how, when he was still in diapers (I get to talk like this now because I am OLD!), I used to go there and watch bands until late into the night, before they turned into a more traditional place like Einstein’s and started closing at 2pm.

I always get a “Titan” which is an open-faced bagel sandwich consisting of avocado, tomato and Spike. This time I asked for back because it was my birthday, dammit. And I deserve bacon.

M & I took E to speech while The Husband ran off to do a very important DMV errand. While we waited for The Boy, my daughter proved she is descended from weirdos.

And then we headed out to the mall to poke around a bit and to paint some ceramics. E got bored within about 20 seconds (I had fully expected him to last 30 seconds), but he kept himself amused by playing with the letter stamps and the mosaic pieces.

I painted a plate. I think it might be nice to eventually have an entire set of hand-painted dishes so here is the first. Originally I had wanted to embellish it with swirlies like I did on my friend’s cup, but I spent so much time redirecting my son that suddenly my family was all done and I had to hurry. Luckily, I remembered Bethany’s dottery technique of using the back end of the paintbrush – so, thank you for the inspiration!

We stopped in a few other stores, buying the requisite Jelly Belly stash, looking for Webkinz cards, and searching (unsuccessfully) for new shoes. While visiting the Hallmark store, we noticed this alarming frog overpopulation problem.

Normally we don’t use the new toll freeway because hello? it’s a FREEway! But I really wanted Pick Up Stix for lunch and the only one I knew of was $3 down the road. So we splurged. And, behold, the lemon chicken was delicious.

After a quick stop at another place to look, once again, for shoes (once again, unsuccessfully) we went home and spent the evening with my two best friends where we ate goat cheese, drank Izzes, played games, looked at old annuals and laughed a lot.

It was a quiet birthday this year, which was exactly what I wanted. And did I mention I got a Wii Fit?

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