My birthday fell on a Saturday this year! The best day of the week. We had a pretty busy day starting with our ward primary talent show. The kids LOVE this annual tradition and it's so fun to see the variety of talents shared. Sarah has the cutest activity days leader ever. My good friend, Angie, for the second year in a row, choreographed a cute dance for the 8-10 year
olds. She goes all out and finds matching shirts on clearance and makes cute props. Last year they did the
Macarena. This year they danced to the Lollipop song. Thus, the adorable lollipop props. The dance was a big hit and such a fun experience for the girls. Angie really makes activity days special for the girls, we are so lucky!
Natalie and Angela did a joke routine including some knock knock jokes, which they love these days. They did such a cute job and got lots of laughs.
Sarah wanted to do magic tricks with her magic set and was hilarious. Not only did her tricks go well, she had quite the showmanship. At the beginning she announced she was the "great Sarah" and that she was the 7
th greatest magician in the world. Or something like that. We had rehearsed some things to help the flow of her routine, but she ad libbed a bunch of funny stuff when she got up in front of the crowd. What a nut.
After the show, we got some lunch at
Quizno's and then Chuck* had to go help a family in our ward move. So I worked on finishing a project I never finished during the week - canning homemade strawberry jam. Earlier in the week, I had received my order of 40 lbs of Oregon strawberries! We have a local farm that picks them, washes them, hulls them and slices them, puts them in a big, old bucket and delivers them the next day to one location. Then we go pick them up at whoever volunteers their house. It is the best deal ever. It cost a little over $1 per pound! And they taste sweeter than any California strawberries you get at the store. No offense California friends. (o:
My canning set up. This is a messy job, but getting over a year's worth of delicious jam is worth it! This picture makes me laugh. My nice, new stainless steel microwave and my dumb, old, mismatched stove that I can't stand except for one thing; I can CAN on it. We have looked for over a year and I can't decide what to do. I want to continue being able to can, but the new electric stove/ovens are all flat tops (unless you get a low-end stove) which they don't recommend canning on. My other option is to pay to put a gas line in, which I'm pretty sure will be expensive. So I continue with my annoying stove, with burners that don't fit.(Because the company decided to go with sizes that aren't standard. DUMB.) Oh well, there's worse things in life...
When I finished canning, I thought for sure Chuck* would be home. The move took much longer than I thought, so the girls and I went for a walk/bike ride several times around the block waiting to go play. Later that night, we went out to dinner and saw the new Toy Story 3 movie, which was hilarious. I love the Toy Story movies - my favorite part was when Ken was modeling all his outfits for Barbie. Oh man, the whole Ken/Barbie storyline in the movie was probably my favorite part. I LOVED playing with Barbie and Ken dolls when I was growing up. All the funny outfits reminded me of playing with my mom and aunts old Barbie's that my grandma saved and some of the hilarious ones my mother-in-law saved that she still has - I don't know where/when she got them, but there's some glittery silver Ken pieces that are priceless. The Ken fashion show in the movie just hit home to me.
So, it ended up being a pretty nice birthday. Chuck* and I also got to go on a birthday date the night before to get dinner and do some birthday shopping. He really wanted to get me an IPad, which looked fun, but was not the most practical thing for a mom who doesn't have much extra time to surf the net, play games or read digital books. I love to read and that part of it was the most intriguing to me, but I can read the old fashioned way for now. Plus, has anyone tried typing on the keypad on that thing? It's hard!
So I opted for a new camera. Yep, I know what you're thinking, doesn't she have enough camera stuff? After using my point and shoot for a year since I dropped it in the sand at the beach last summer (it still worked, but if you tried to zoom it shut down) I decided it would be nice to have a new one. I don't always like to lug around my big, expensive camera on every outing.
So that was my 35th birthday. I'm getting O-L-D! What the heck??
