Back to Reality After the Best Birthday EVER!

Yesterday was my birthday and it was AWESOME. My mom spent the night the day before so she was here to help me clean the house and get the kids ready for church in the morning. Abby wore her new sweater dress and got tons of compliments on it. Someone even asked me where to buy such an adorable outfit!

Then we made spaghetti & meatball cupcakes, which are just regular cupcakes with the icing squeezed from a ziplock bag to look stringy with strawberry jelly & malted milk balls on top. My grandparents came and brought a cake and we ordered pizza. So there was a lot of this:

and these:

I had a little fake-out because in the afternoon the doorbell rang and when I saw it was a guy about my age my heart skipped a beat thinking Eddie had come home, but it was my friend Kirsten’s husband dropping off a candle order I had placed with her because she is a consultant for For Every Home.

I got lots of cards, phone calls, and Facebook birthday wishes and gifts from family included a closet organizer that I had asked for, my new Serger (which is actually an early Christmas present but it happened to come this week for my birthday), money that I was specifically instructed to spend on myself, new earrings, and then there was the best gift EVER….

At about 6pm everyone had just gone home and I was giving the kids a bath when the phone rang. I ignored it because I knew it was Eddie calling from VA where he is on the current leg of his business trip and I figured I could call him back after bath time, but he just kept calling (3 or 4 times in a row) so I went and got the phone thinking there might be an emergency. Well, he told me he had just asked a friend to drop off a special present for me on the front porch. I told him it was just going to have to wait a second because the kids were soaking wet and naked, so he waited on the phone while I got them dried off and in their pajamas.

I went outside to see what it was and there was a Target bag sitting outside the front door. I bent down to pick it up and someone yelled “Happy Birthday!” I looked up thinking I was about to see our friend Josh (because he probably would have been the one Eddie asked to do a favor like that) but it was EDDIE! He had rented a car and driven 5 hours round trip even though his team had worked that day. He was only able to stay for about 3 hours, but HE CAME HOME!!! I have never cried tears of joy in my entire life until that moment. I didn’t even cry at our wedding, but I could not stop crying.

Oh, and what was in the Target bag? A new camera! He had gone to several different Targets because apparently it was sold out in VA, to get the Nikon L110 I wanted. He bought it from Target instead of another store because they had it on sale this week.

Eddie got to spend some time with the kids and tuck them into bed (poor Nicholas cried and begged his daddy not to go back to work again) and then we got to spend some time alone and play with the new camera and share some of my left-over birthday pizza & cake before he had to leave again.

Sigh. I’m starting to rack up a few birthdays over here, but that was the best one yet.

I hope the high lasts quite a while because it will make it easier to go back to reality and situations like this morning when the dog decided that 7am was a great time to dig this hole

which led to this bath

which made the tub look like this:

which left me scrubbing the tub and amassing a huge pile of filthy towels that now need to be washed while Nicholas unrolled an entire roll of paper towels so that he could get the “telescope” from the middle and Abby choked on a baby wipe because she has a weird obsession with eating baby wipes.

But at least I got to play with my new camera in the process!