Gratulere Med Dagen Til Oss!

For those of you who don't speak Norwegian (like me), that means happy birthday to us.

My birthday was on Tuesday (did you know that St. Patrick's Day is really all about me?) and Chris's birthday is today. We were born in the same year, so for those of you who are counting, yes, I am older than him. By two days.

When my siblings and I were little, my mom would often decorate the house for our birthdays. It was always fun to wake up and find streamers and balloons just for you. Well, I received quite a pleasant surprise when I got to school on Tuesday, especially in light of this childhood tradition.

The blue banner was out on the ramp to my portable (my class is outside). The streamers were all inside my classroom. A couple of my students and their mom arranged with the custodian to come in after I'd left school on Monday to decorate so it would all be ready for me when I got to school on my birthday. :)

Our first celebration, though, was birthday shopping last Friday. Hooray for us, both Chris and I had the day off, and, thankfully, neither of us were sick. Double Hooray! We took our birthday budget and some money Chris had saved up and we each bought the things we wanted. Chris bought an iPod Touch. For the techies out there, it is generation 2 with 32 gigs of memory.


His favorite application is the scriptures. He paid $15 to download the program. It has a ton of features...you can look up scriptures very quickly, bookmark a ton, highlight, underline, bold, make notes, pretty much all the things you would think to do in regular scriptures. It also includes all of the lesson manuals for Gospel Doctrine and Priesthood/RS, as well as several of the handbooks and instruction books. It also has all the hymns and the Primary songbook. Pretty much worth fifteen bucks.

My present, surprise surprise, was more movies. I won't bore you with a list, but I think we ended up with nine or ten in the end. By the way, we buy most of our movies from the $5 rack at Wal-Mart and previously viewed at Hastings (and there was a sale on Friday, which helped). I very, very rarely pay full price for a brand-new movie.

We also bought a new Wii game to add to that slowly growing collection. The bonus of this game was that it fits into another collection we're working on:


Chris has been collecting Rubik's cubes for a few years now. He has three original cubes (3x3), a 4x4, 5x5, 3x3 keychain, 2x2 junior cube, a silver/gray/white 3x3, a completely silver 3x3 (that's just funny), a tic-tac-toe cube, Rubik's Revolution (it's more like Bop-it than a regular cube), and a Rubik's snake, which really has nothing to do with cubes, but it has the name, so it's in the collection. The game we bought for the Wii is Rubik's World, which lets you solve a regular cube, and has several other spin-offs using cubes and cube bits ("cubies"). It's a little addictive trying to solve the puzzles.

Ok, I'm getting bored with my own post...that probably means you are, too! I'll wrap it up quick. Chris bought me roses on my birthday. Thank you!



And finally, for the smile value, here's a cute picture of Jane. We went to Wendy's a while back for Frosty's. I thought we'd let Jane have a go at her own, so we put a little bit in a cup and gave her a spoon. I think she figured it out.



P.S. Tannie, I was totally planning on having a girls' night to celebrate my birthday (really, just an excuse for a party). When I told Chris about it, he wanted to know why he didn't get a party, too. So, we were going to have a couples party and invite a ton of people over to our house...then we all got sick. In the time that I would have sent out invitations and made the plans, I was in bed hacking up a lung. I just had to tell you because you say that everyone says they're going to have a party and no one does. I fit neatly into that category.

Maybe we'll shoot for a summer bbq when it gets warmer. We do have a HUGE backyard...