Golden Holiday

11 solid months of daily picture taking down with one more to go.

I had some birthday money burning a hole in my pocket and I knew Britt could help remedy that. Had a fantastic girls night with my little personal shopper. We showed up wearing the same skirt.

As I was uploading photos I found these little nuggets, Doug must have taken them at lunch and I didn’t know they were on the camera. Cracked me up.

 

Happy early birthday to me.

Professor finally gave his stamp of approval. Now is there anything more adorable than a kitten sitting on top of a blue Tiffany’s box? I think you might be hard pressed to come up with something.

Ever since I was a little girl I remember my mother talking about “golden birthdays”.  A golden birthday is when you turn the age of your birthdate, e.g., me turning 27 on November 27th. As tradition goes, you are supposed to receive something gold on this birthday. I’ve been pounding this into Doug’s head for the last five or so years. He was convinced that it was just a scheme my mother and I hatched and there was no such thing as a “golden birthday”. It didn’t help that whenever he brought it up to anyone they’d go, “Golden what?” and he’d look at me and say “See?! I told you. It’s not a thing.” Well, for him being a non-believer he really pulled through with the whole day.

Woke up to this:

He got me a golden cake at work.

We went out for a sushi lunch with Chris and Julia because Julia and I are birthday twins.

My parents came over after work and set off making this beauty. (Doug ordered gold colored frosting online. I’m serious.)

Ended with him giving me a beautiful golden ring with my birthstone in it. I love it. Truthfully I wasn’t expecting anything gold and it was just fun-and-games to joke about but it ended up being such a nice day.

I convinced everyone to play Clue with me. I don’t know why everyone hates this game but you better believe that this one day a year I make people play with me!

Oh yes, and he got me a matching hat.

I volunteered to host Thanksgiving this year. I had three nightmares about cooking my turkey. I was pretty nervous about the whole thing but was ready to order Chinese as backup if failure did occur. I made a few things on Wednesday but we played Clue too late and I was tired so the bulk was done on Thursday: two pumpkin pies, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, cranberry relish and of course the turkey. I think I’ll chalk it up as a success. Doug’s parents and my parents joined us and we had the best day. Thankfully they brought some delicious side dishes and rolls. We filled up on our feast then watched Holiday Inn while we ate our pie. Thumbs up. Also I learned a little secret, if you host Thanksgiving that means you get to keep the leftovers. That means we’ve had four Thanksgiving dinners in a row. Two thumbs up.

Britt and Casey came to visit us after their pre-black Friday shopping woes.

I don’t actually remember what he was talking about in those two pictures above but I thought they were funny.

 

Our buddies, the Hawkes, came over for hot cocoa and Elf on Friday. Of course Elvis had to make an appearance. Our friends’/families’ kids just know us as “the ones with the bird”. Yep. That’s us.

Went shooting Saturday afternoon. Thank you, Rob.

We’re all tired after the amount of tryptophan we’ve digested the past four days.