Each fall, I face a difficult paradox: I hate the impending doom of the cold weather, but I also love the holidays. Holiday #1: My birthday. This is a big deal, so I celebrate Birthday Week. Someday, I'd like to expand it to Birthday Month, but I'm happy for what I've got for now.
This year I signed up for as many restaurant e-mail clubs as possible so I could get free food for my birthday. What I didn't know, though, was that most of those clubs also give you coupons just for signing up. So between signing up and having a birthday all in the same week, I ended up with about thirty coupons to various restaurants around the city. Now, some were lame. Wendy's, as you can see in the picture, gave me $1 off a premium sandwich. I mean, I'll take it. I used it this week. But you'd think they'd at least give me a free frosty or something. Some were pretty good, though. At Jersey Mike's, for example, you can walk in on your birthday, show them your ID and get a sub for free. No strings attached. At Moe's I just had to buy a drink to get a free entrée. I need to find a sushi one for next year. Let me know if you know of anything. Most of these coupons expired before I could use them, but it was nice to have options!
Here's one example: The weekend before my birthday, I went to TGIFriday's with a friend from work and got this delicious brownie sundae for free. And they had a different special going on that gave me an insane amount of food for ten bucks. That was not the last time I felt uncomfortable full over the next couple of weeks.
The day of my birthday I had to work, but when I came upstairs in the morning, my sister had left these for me on the bar. I don't know if she knew or just took a lucky guess, but I LOVE fresh flowers, so I was super excited about this surprise.
I'd been telling my students for weeks that my birthday was coming up, and the night before my birthday I gave them all homework to bring me goodies. Several of them listened and followed through. I actually told them that all I wanted for my birthday was a new timer. I got all sorts of other useless objects and no timer. I also told them I wanted students who listen and do what I ask them to do, but I didn't get that either.
That night I went to dinner with my family at Texas Roadhouse. It was kind of last-minute but almost everyone was able to be there, which was really fun. I chose Roadhouse because (surprise, surprise) I had a coupon there. I didn't think about the fact that they make you sit on a saddle while they all say "Yeehaw!" I hoped no one would remember, but Jacob was there which blew my chances. He was so excited about me sitting on a saddle. I was less excited.
The flash on my camera is really bright. Sorry about that, friends.
My mom had been at our house watching Tessa's kids before dinner. She told me they'd been working on a surprise for me. When I got home, I came down to my room and found hearts all over the door and all in my room. My mom, Emerson, Cooper, and Campbell had cut out and decorated the hearts. On some of them they had written things they liked about me, such as "She plays with us" or "She paints my nails." One of my favorites, from Cooper, says "I want her to always be my friend." I'm so grateful for my mom, for knowing exactly what I needed to ease some of the stress of getting older without getting any closer to having my own kids. And I'm grateful for these kids who light up my days and make me so happy just by playing with, talking to, and loving me and letting me love them.
Afterwards, my mom sent me these pictures she'd taken while they were making them.
They also made some pretty delicious red velvet cake balls. I guess Emerson wasn't so sure about them.
Before going to bed, I played Memory with Campbell, and I whooped her. I had to take a picture of it to commemorate the event, since she ALWAYS wins. All those matches on the right are mine, compared to hers on the left. She wasn't very happy about it, though, even when I told her it was ok for me to win on my birthday.
The next day after work, some co-workers and I went bowling, then to dinner. The bowling alley was this crazy nice place with TVs and servers who came to your lane to bring you food and drinks (including this free birthday ice cream). I bowled a pretty good one on my first frame, and my friend Kelly said, "Wow, I didn't know you were so good!" She spoke too soon. I went down from there and ended up losing miserably. I'm the top of the screen.
Amy and Kelly.
After we bowled, Kelly left but the rest of us stayed and the boys played some arcade games.
We went to Champp's for dinner afterwards, and I ate a full meal plus another round of free birthday ice cream sundae. I did not feel well.
Jaime flew in late that night to spend the weekend with me for my birthday. We ate out four times in 3 days (one of which was a Sunday). The first: Texas Roadhouse. Don't judge. It's so good. And it was my birthday. And it's tradition. And I had another coupon.
That night we met my mom and sisters and niece for dinner at Bru Burger downtown Indy, followed by the musical Wicked.
I don't like to like things that everyone else likes, so I've never hopped on the Wicked bandwagon. Turns out it's popular for a reason. It's AMAZING. I still don't think I'll be buying the soundtrack or anything, but I was absolutely blown away by the quality of the performance. The music was fun and moving, but the voices of the two lead women were incredible. After the huge musical number ending the first act, I found myself crying for no other reason than in wonder and awe at such incredible talent. They were that good. The story was interesting, too, and it was fun to see how it tied in with so many parts of the original The Wizard of Oz story. I loved it and would see it again in a heartbeat.
The next day, Jaime and I went to lunch at Olive Garden (another coupon!), then went to see Catching Fire. Don't worry, we ate two of those giant bags of popcorn. That movie was great, too, though I don't think I was prepared for how emotionally intense it would be. I've read the book, so I knew the story, but I was still nervous the whole time.
Afterwards, we went to a sushi place (no coupon, but I did have a groupon!) for dinner. I've shared my love for sushi on this blog before, so I'll spare you the gushing about how good it was. (But sushi's sooooooooooo good).
The next day we went to church then came home and made some tacos that were also amazing. I didn't get a picture of those because we were eating them while I was on a conference call for my new calling as the regional young single adult rep for my area. But they were delicious. Jaime and I are best friends for a lot of reasons, but one of them is because we're just so good at food. We love the same delicious restaurants, we love the same snack foods, and we make delicious meals together. Any time that we're together is filled with good food.
Sadly, she had to go home the next morning, and I had to go back to work, which just about sent me into a depression. Fortunately, the next week was a short week because of Thanksgiving. I'll do a separate post about that, but I also wanted to show you the free burrito I got from Moe's for my birthday the day after Thanksgiving - more than a week after my birthday. Seriously, if you have an email account that you don't mind getting flooded with emails, you should sign up for these email clubs. Free food all over the place!!
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