Happy Birthday to me! (Among other things)

This year on the actual day of my birthday my brother Steve came to town and provided the impetus to get all the local family adults to hit the slopes together. It's the first time that has happened in years and it was a blast. Steve, Mom, Dad, Christine, Scott & I all managed to take the day off, make arrangements for the kids, find all our snow gear, rent equipment, and spent the day at Brighton together. As a mom (or really any type of adult), your birthday often passes as you take care of normal daily duties and people ask "are you having a nice birthday" and you grin and say "yes" even though you're just changing diapers and doing dishes again. It was so special to get to do something so out of the ordinary on my actual birthday -- I highly recommend it. We stopped at Hires on the way home, then had some dessert with the kids.



Yellow cake straight out of the box mix with chocolate frosting from the tub remains the best cake in the world -- especially the leftovers. Man that's a lot of candles.



Other family activities...

Haircuts for the kids at Cookie Cutters (in Lehi). I highly recommend this place. Besides the fact that each kid gets to pick their own movie to watch or video game to play, besides the special cars to sit in and kid-friendly dispositions and tricks of the stylists, besides the jungle gym and computer to play on in the waiting area and the balloons & lollypops at checkout, besides the reasonable prices (especially given all of the above), this place actually gives decent haircuts.

Did you know Provo has it's own DINOSAUR MUSEUM?!?! We've been wanting to go for a while, but their hours (M-F 9-5) aren't completely convenient. It was totally awesome. They had lots of cool stuff set up and you can watch the BYU professors/students working on some real fossils. Definitely worth the $0.50 admission price.

We have been enjoying some nice weather lately, and trying to get outside more. Can't get enough of feeding the ducks! Also the past couple of days I've been tackling the massive amounts of yard cleanup work that should have been done last fall. At first it was overwhelming, but now I remember how much I like working out in the yard and am opting to be outside over pretty much every other household responsibility I should be doing. I wonder if it will snow again this year. Probably about time to take the Christimas lights down.