A Birthday Weekend

I LOVE birthdays!!!
It doesn’t really matter if it’s mine. I think I’ve been more excited about John’s birthday than he has. Probably because I LOVE planning birthday surprises for him :) It’s so fun. And it’s another reason to celebrate. And I had lots of surprises in store for him this year!
So John’s birthday is today, but I tried to spread out some of the birthday goodness throughout the weekend. Saturday night I surprised him with one of his favorite meals: fish tacos. Complete with lime coleslaw and mango salsa. I never make seafood because I hate fish. ew. So it’s a special occasion indeed when I make fish tacos for John (mostly because it involves making myself a separate meal…too much work… but I had leftovers for dinner, so it worked out nicely) and allow the apartment to smell like fish for at least a day ;) But this happy (full of fishy tacos) smile makes it all worth it!

I also made cookies for John to take to work. I had so much fun with these. I think John is a coastal guy, you know? So I made west coast cookies…
And east coast cookies!

Totally loving my surfboards and life preservers!! And of course I had to package them and make cute bag toppers so that they were cute when John took them to work. (but my Adobe Photoshop trial is over!! WAAHHHHHH! My mom is going to get it for me for my birthday maybe? yes? please? :) I love my nautical themed toppers – too fun!

Recently John has been teasing me that one of my mottos (heard off of an episode of Mythbusters) should be “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth over doing”. And I gotta say…after decorating the apartment…he’s probably right ;)
I have decided I’m only as awesome as I am because of Pinterest. I learned you can print onto post it notes. My life has been forever altered.Seriously people. Cheap, easy and CUTE! Perfect.

And since I loved printing on post its so much, I made 27 love note post its (you know…one for each year…) to go all around the living room

And of course, we couldn’t go without steamers and balloons! Thankfully, I found the bike pump in the storage closet, otherwise I might still be passed out from blowing up all those balloons myself…and I found some good pumpin’ up music to listen to…get it?! While I pumped up my balloons?! ha ha haaa…okay. nevermind. Streamers. Decorations. Moving on…
Please forgive me my bad lighting, but when it gets to be 89 degrees before 9am, we tend to not want too much of that ridiculously hot sunlight coming into the apartment…

Then I went to Party City and got some balloons filled with helium and then anchored them with some candy. And here’s the finished look! :)

But before John got to see all the fun decorations, I picked him up from work, blindfolded him (a few of his coworkers saw me blindfold him in the parking lot and totally thought it was so funny) and we went to a surprise birthday dinner at Famous Dave’s!

After stuffing ourselves silly with ribs, brisket, fries and cornbread, we rolled out way back home to open presents! John loved all the fun decorations, by the way :)
He got a pretty good haul this year! He got some books on decorative knots and model ship building, new biking gloves and bike tools and some $$ from his Mom and Dad. I made him some pajama shorts and a couple of T-shirts, and got him a cyclocomputer (something fancy that goes on his bike and can track his speed/distance/other nifty stuff) and his first model ship kit (he’s been wanting this model for a while and everywhere he looked online they were out of stock! I scored major wifey points for finding it!!). My parents have another present for him coming in the mail…so I can’t tell you what it is yet :)

I just love my cute boy :) We finished the evening with some birthday candy and an episode of Mythbusters. It was a good day. Happy birthday John! I sure do love you!