My birthday!

 

It was a birthday weekend, really - it started out with a chocolate card, chocolate-dipped strawberries, and flowers from Gwen and Sylvan, and a gift card for yummy treats from Mom.  

On Sunday we went to the Celtic festival at the Museum Center, which was awesome.  There were booths for vendors, artisan booths, bagpipers and Irish dancers, everything Celtic you could think of. The best part was when we saw the children's dance performance.  I learned from the woman introducing the kids that Irish/Scottish dancing was originally performed by men before battle, when they would wear heavy armor on their chests, and kilts.  That explains why the dancing is so straight-backed, and mostly involves leg movement.  It's the precursor to both ballet and square dancing.  Anyway, at the very end of the performance, the woman asked for volunteers, and she "taught" a simple dance to the kidlets.  Behold our tiny Scottish dancer.  He had so much fun!

Monday itself, my actual birthday, I went to HUC for a community lunch, and brought Ari along with.  Nothing like good socializing!

                                              

Jill, Daria, myself and Ari in the baby corner.

Note Daria's hand placement.  Apparently it's a shidduch!  (match)

Ari was so tired from all his womanizing that he got grumpy.  About six people passed him around, but he only started to fade when Danyul held him:

 

Then they both fell asleep.

After I woke up Ari, we came home and I RELAXED.  It was glorious.  I checked out my Facebook page and saw all the lovely messages.  Then I cracked up repeatedly at the creativity of Rachael J., who wished me happy birthday in every medium possible: in person at school, with a phone call, on Facebook, in a text message, email, and a blog comment.  

At around 5, Jonathan and I picked up Xander and we got my favorite take-out (yay Greek salad!).   Then after kidlet bedtime, I got to read!  Not just Feminist Harry Potter, but a few more articles in The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Daily Life in Roman Palestine.  Do NOT laugh, it was honestly really enjoyable!

The day ended with a glass of wine and more chocolate.  You can't get any better than that!