An Early Birthday

For me!! :) Hurray!

You see, my birthday is on Friday. But tomorrow I leave for Las Vegas and Sedona. So John and I wanted to have a birthday celebration before I left. John will be joining me in Sedona on Friday, but he won’t get in until late that night. So an early celebration it was!

We started the day off by sleeping in waaaaay late (that was unplanned though…both of us were rather surprised when we looked at the clock and it was 10! yikes! neither of us sleep in that late…usually…) and then had some delicious smoothies for breakfast. And I got to open some presents!! (we didn’t take any pictures though… I wasn’t ready for the day…ha!) I had received my own version of Adobe Photoshop from my parents on Thursday (SO excited!!! no more trial!!! hurray for unlimited photo awesomeness!!!!) and as another gift, my Mom paid for our piano to get fixed!! HURRAY! If you remember from when we first moved here, the piano had died. We thought that it had just finally enough (I did learn to play on that piano…which makes it about 17 years old) but we found a piano repair guy that works on electric pianos and it turns out we had a bad plug! Replaced the plug and done! Yay!! So glad to have it working again.

Anyway, back to more presents :) My in-laws gave me a gift card to Amazon (more on that in a moment), a fun little gadget that makes mini pies that look like pop-tarts (according to John) and my mother-in-law gave me a bunch of her old cookie cutters! There was several shapes I have wanted, and some other random fun ones. I will have to make some cookies when I get back from Arizona :) There is another present from my in-laws waiting for me at my parent’s house that I will get to open tomorrow before we leave for the airport…so I’ll have to get back to you on that one :)

And finally, John’s gift: A Kindle Fire!!!! LOVE IT! He totally surprised (and splurged on) me! He is so awesome. Apparently that was what the Amazon gift card was for, which I promptly spent on ebooks. :) I’ve already read an entire ebook on it and I’ve only had it 2 1/2 days. ha! I have a little collection starting now and I love that I have them all on the little device and I don’t have to lug a bunch of books around, especially for my trip! YAY! I love love love my new toy and I would have spent the rest of the day playing around with it, but John had some more plans for the day!

First stop, Charm City Cakes!
Alright, if you’ve been living under a rock (just kidding), Charm City Cakes is Chef Duff’s cake shop from the show Ace of Cakes! That was the show that really got me into cake decorating and my pastry journey :) I’m so sad they discontinued the show…
We didn’t get to go in, it was by appointment only, but it was enough for me just to see it :) …and it was in a reallllly sketchy neighborhood…so we didn’t want to leave the car alone for too long…

After navigating our way through a scary part of Baltimore, we made it to the National Museum of Dentistry (you might be thinking this is a weird way to spend my birthday celebration, and that’s okay, but I loved it – we’re checking things off on the bucket list!). I had no idea teeth could be so interesting :)
The royal dental instruments for Queen Victoria
We learned the Mayans would drill into their teeth and inlay stones! Eek!!!
A travelling dentist’s accoutrements
Old dentist chairs were super fancy looking ;) We saw one with tassels/fringes too
A plush dentist tool toy…who knew?
And of course, George Washington’s fake teeth!

There was also a cool exhibit on forensic dentistry and how they can identify people based on information they gather from teeth. Crazy! Yeah, I didn’t know there was such a thing as forensic dentistry either…

After all that we went to dinner at Outback Steakhouse. It’s tradition. Because that was what I always requested for my birthday dinner growing up. And it was delicious! I probably ate an entire day’s worth of calories in that single meal, but oh, it was so worth it. :) 

And so I’ve got to say it was a pretty good early birthday!