My Birthday

When December rolled around, it was time for another birthday for me. I love having my birthday at Christmas time. We weren't sure what to do to celebrate. I knew I wanted to go out to eat with Ross, but we couldn't think of anything else to do. I wanted to do something festive, but I had a hard time finding anything that was happening the night of my birthday. Then on the afternoon of my birthday I found out about a Christmas light river cruise near us, so we went to check it out. They took us down a little section of the river that was all decorated with Christmas lights. We even got a visit from Santa who happened to be rowing by on a canoe. I thought it was really fun. Here's some pictures I took on the river cruise.

Afterwards, we went out for dinner. And as we were leaving the restaurant we ran into a couple of my dear friends that I served with in young womens, Debbie and Janice. They have since moved from the ward so that they could take care of their aging parents. But I have missed them a lot and it was the highlight of my birthday to see and visit with them. Don't you just love "divinely arranged" coincidences?! 

It was so nice to have a night out without the kids (Ross's mom was taking care of them for us). But after a stop at Wal-mart to pick up a few things, we decided that it was probably time to go rescue Ross's mom from our two hooligans.  

My kids love playing with the cameras whenever they come out. So here's a few pictures we took that night after I opened up my birthday cards. 

So I decided that I wanted to wait and find out the gender of baby #3 as part of my birthday celebration. When we went to the ultrasound, everything looked great. When they got down to checking things out in the lower body area, they had us turn away so we wouldn't accidently see anything. And when we were done, they put the picture of the baby's gender in an envelope so that it could stay a secret until we were ready to reveal.

I asked my friend and neighbor, Bonnie, to make a cake for my birthday party we had planned for a couple days after my actual birthday that would reveal the gender of our baby. That way it would be a surprise, even for us. So the day before my "pretend" birthday as Leah called it, Bonnie picked up the sealed envelope and then I anxiously waited. 

This was what the cake looked like when she brought it over for the party. Didn't she do a great job!

After the guests arrived we gathered around so we could cut into the cake to find out if the inside was blue or pink.

And here we are revealing the first slice of PINK cake! It's a girl!! I was fully expecting the cake to be blue, even though in my heart I wanted it to be pink. So seeing that it was indeed going to be a girl made the cake all the more sweeter. (But for the record, I would have been happy having a boy too.) But now we get to put our abundance of baby girl clothes and such to good use again! We also have to try to come up with some girl names that we like. I was totally thinking in boy mode and definitely had more boy names than girl ones in mind at that time. 

By the way, the cake tasted as good at it looked. I still get people commenting on how great the cake was. Bonnie is a baking genius and I knew she would do a great job! Overall, I'd say this was a fun and very memorable birthday. Thank you again to everyone who had a hand in making this time special for me!