On Friday, the kids stayed the night with Mary and Steve, a saintly empty-nester couple from church. Andrew and I went up to Raleigh and actually got to go to the temple together. It was WONDERFUL! I wish that could happen more often. We went out to P.F. Chang's afterward. I forget how much I love the food there until I'm actually sitting down and devouring it.
Fun date night.And, the preggo girl didn't even give out early. We didn't get home until almost 1 a.m. and I hung in there. Very impressive.
On Sunday after church we did the actual birthday dinner/cake/presents. Sometimes I wonder why I even try when it comes to making cakes. I don't think I've had a successful one yet. The kids and I decided to make a nice little two-layer cake for Drew. I couldn't find my round baking pans, so we used square ones, which I thought would be fine and make it a little unique. Well....the baking part went OK, but when it came time to frost, we had a disaster. One of the cans of frosting had the seal broken and was completely crystallized. Agh! One can of frosting won't cut it for a double layer square cake!
So instead, he ended up with 1 1/2 layers. It kinda reminds me of the Mesa Arizona temple. Rather than pile 33 candles on, we put three on the top layer and three on the bottom. I love how Whitney is helping him blow them out in this pic.Here is the adorable card that Brandon made.
Can you read the left side? It says, "Happy birthday Dad.
You are the 2nd best Dad ever. You Rock. B"
So, of course Andrew had to ask the question,"Who's the best dad ever?"
B: "Heavenly Father, of course."
Also love the sentiment on the right side:
33 is fun!
For his gift, I got Andrew a print of "The Patriot"
by Nick Greenwood, an artist we go to church with.
Isn't it an awesome picture?To keep the fun going, Andrew took off work on Monday. The kids already had it off for Veteran's Day. We took a family trip to the zoo.
This was the scenery on the side of the road thewhole way down there. It was breathtaking! Loved it.
And throughout the zoo, the fall foliage was just as gorgeous.
Since we didn't take our annual drive up the Blue Ridge Pkwy
for fall pics, I figured this might be the best opportunity we'd have.
Oh, and there were some animals there, too.
If you look above Whit's shoulder, you can see a rhino.
Her favorite animal is the giraffe and sheloved seeing them in real life.
Brandon loved the gorilla, but I didn't get any
pics of him.
Andrew and I loved the sea lions best.They were complete show-offs and were swimming
back and forth and doing acrobatics the whole
time we were watching. Very fun.
Today it was back to work and school as usual. Party's over, folks. And I guess I better get to work myself, too. It would be nice to have more than a blog post to show for my morning alone. :)
9 comments:
What a great birthday! I think a 1 1/2 layer cake is even more unique than a square 2 layer cake. (-:
Wow you guys live in a beautiful place! Looks like you all had fun with the birthday stuff! And who cares about what the cake looks like - as long as it TASTES good, right??!! And someday, you're kids will be reminiscing about the good old days and one of them will bring up, "Remember those birthday cakes Mom always used to make?" (giggling)"Yeah, they were the BEST"!
Awwww! The zoo looks like fun. And that picture of the cake is hilarious! Cakes are hard to do. Mine are always lopsided!
Happy Birthday Andrew. It is so good to get to see your cute family. -heather carlile(norman)
The pictures of NC fall foliage and the totally handsome/beautiful people are great. Today's blog was easily worth a morning's work; take the rest of the day off.
PS
Are you still indexing?
Thanks for the gorgeous photos - and not only did you get to go to the Temple but you built one too - that cracked me up! When I was your age, our Primary PResidency of Linda, Nancy and I would take turns making a birthday cake for every single Primary teacher on her birthday. We were NUTS! I don't think I ever made one cake that turned out - once I even dropped the entire cake in the road as I was getting out of the car to deliver it. But when I'd make a cake for no reason on a Thursday night, they were perfectly symmetrical and little pieces of cake didn't stick to the knife when I frosted them.
Love you all - only 362 more days for the next Andrew-a-thon!
XO
Mom Sweat
Grandpa--When I went through my three weeks of TERRIBLE morning sickness, indexing was one of the first things to go. But now that I'm feeling a bit better, I'm back into it. I only do a couple batches a week, but figure every little bit helps.
Sounds like you had fun. I love the pictures.
So I STILL haven't called Drew for his birthday. So it's officially not over yet. I'm going to call him ... right . . .NOW! Hopefully he's home and not off doing Bishoply things!
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