My sort-of birthday!

Tonight we celebrated my birthday! Yay!

This morning ... i missed most of the morning, because i've been getting more and more sleep-deprived and totally slept in and caught up on a little bit of sleep today. So nice!

But then this afternoon, i made the kids help me clean the house and the guinea pig cage, and then we all worked on getting the backyard cleaned up a little bit. It was an insane mess after the winter - things got thrown around and left, and it was just out of control. So now it's clean! Mostly! I mean, it's still almost entirely dirt, because our tree is so huge that we can't get anything to grow, but it's dirt without trash and toys and sticks and random shovels and buckets scattered about! Yay!

And then Beth and Keren and my parents came over, and we grilled kebabs of steak and chicken and lots of yummy veggies. Plus we had kebabs of fruit, and Beth made the really yummy tomato-basil-mozzarella kebabs that she makes. So it was a meal full of things on sticks, and it was delicious.

Keren and Beth brought their Hogwarts house cups, which we bought altogether as a set when we were at Harry Potter world, and we reunited them for Harry Potter day - the anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts! I love that we all belong to different houses.

Beth made my cake - Juanito is making one for tomorrow, to bring to my parents' house, to celebrate my birthday and my mom's, and he makes amazing cakes, but ... i kind of wanted a from-a-box chocolate fudge cake with store-bought frosting full of transfats. It's my favorite kind, and i think it would kill Juanito a little bit to have to make something so ... pedestrian. And the cake that Beth made for me; it was amazing. She had Juanito help her decorate it - she said, "Okay, use this colors and draw these things," and Juanito used his mad art skills to realize her vision, and it was the most adorable cake ever. There was a little hedgehog and a little owl, and it made me a little bit sad to have to eat it. But eat it we did, and it made me really, really happy. YUM!

And then i got to open presents, and presents are always fun. Beth made me an amazing picture frame with Harry Potter and Dumbledore and Hogwarts and the quote, "It is my belief...that truth is generally preferable to lies," and Starry Night (my favorite painting) and Doctor Who and the quote, "I am and always will be the optimist, the hoper of far-flung hopes, and the dreamer of impossible dreams." Everything about it makes me really, really happy. And Juanito and the kids snuck out while Emma and i were at the dog park to take a picture of themselves, and then Juanito made a clock for me with the picture. They're each holding a number - 3, 6, 9, 12 - at the appropriate place for a clock, and so the kids are all, "It's Zane o'clock!" So now i have two new, awesome things to hang on my walls!

So, all in all, a very good birthday. Yay!