31.

Today is my birthday (I've got less than half an hour to go). For weeks, I have told Tim that I wanted to go to the zoo on my birthday, to which he replied "But we ALWAYS go to the zoo on your birthday!" I like to think he's referring to my 25th birthday, when we actually did go to the zoo, and not a year like last year, when we flew to Colorado and spent a weekend with my family.

His comment (and my nostalgic view on aging) got me thinking, though, about how different and sometimes memorable my birthdays have been. In elementary school, my mom had several of my closest friends over for parties, and we would do crafts, be silly and open presents.

I think this was my 7th birthday party.
And true story: I've kept in touch with all of the girls in this photo.

Birthdays through the end of elementary school and middle school don't really stick out much in my mind (probably mostly cuz I'm old now). But in high school, I remember group birthday parties - most notably with my friend Jen, who was born five days before me, and our friend Megan, who was born five days after me. Our circle of friends would come out and celebrate with us - we'd usually go out for dinner and a movie. We were a tight bunch, so we didn't need to do anything exciting - it was just fun to all be out together celebrating, joking about our Honors English class or the latest project in our German class, or even planning details for prom, which was only a few weeks away.

College brought to my attention the unfortunate timing of my birthday: Finals week. We still managed to celebrate, though, often taking a study break to go out for a few hours. My nearest and dearest cleared their study schedules for my 21st birthday, when I realized the plus to the timing of my birthday meant that the bars were almost empty, as people were holed up studying for finals. Score!

After graduation from college, I moved around a bit, from job to job and state to state. Tim and I have been dating since I was 23, but we dated long-distance for about three years before both moving to Florida, so he wasn't always able to be there on my actual birthday. On my 24th birthday, I bought my first car. I don't recommend doing that, as I was stressed out beyond belief on my birthday and felt bad for my friend Sarah, who was visiting me for the weekend and got sucked in to the car drama.

At the Pittsburgh Zoo with my birthday
celebration buddies, Jen and Megan.

My quarter-century celebration was quite memorable, as I was living in Pittsburgh - my favoritest city EVER. I had a work schedule that allowed for a social life, so I actually had friends in the city. And Pittsburgh was close enough to where I had grown up that many of my high school and college besties were able to attend the festivities, too. I planned a day to remember - we went to the Pittsburgh Zoo, then went to the river front for dinner and drinks at the Hard Rock Cafe, and then we rode a ferry over to PNC Park to catch a Pirates game. It was awesome.

Oh, Magic Kingdom.

On my 28th birthday, Tim and I took advantage of a promotional offer at Disney - Florida residents got in to the park of their choice on their birthday. Since Disney is within comfortable driving distance and we only had to buy Tim's admission, we hopped over to Orlando for the day.

My 29th birthday was spent working two jobs and being 26.5 weeks pregnant. My 30th birthday, as previously mentioned, was spent in Colorado with my family. The traveling part kinda stunk, as I was motion sick and altitude sick on my actual birthday, but the weekend was fun. We were pretty much snowed in, but the place we stayed in was awesome and it was very cool to hang out with my family, which included my 10-month old niece and Elle, who was nine months old.

We're not in Florida anymore.

And then this year, we went to the zoo. I've been to the Lowry Park Zoo two other times, I think, but I read Zoo Story earlier this year and have been wanting to go back ever since. It was hot, but not as hot as it will be in a month or two, and Elle is at an age where she really got in to it. We've been talking about the animals she'd see, she's been demonstrating the animals noises and she was super excited. It was a blast, but exhausting :) And in the end, she enjoyed the animals, especially the monkeys, fish and tigers, but she loved the water areas the most.

Checking out the tigers.

This was quite an adventure.

After our day at the zoo, we went out to dinner, where I enjoyed a glass of wine, some yummy pizza and free birthday baklava :) Because my eating was less than stellar today, I then headed to the gym to squeeze in a quick treadmill workout before coming home and basically being a vegetable.

Basically, my birthday weekend was pretty sweet. Tim let me sleep in yesterday, and today I opened cards and presents, was relieved from chores, was showered in Facebook notifications, texts and calls, and know that Elle will sleep extremely well tonight.

I loved my day - it was nearly perfect. And it brought to my attention that a) maybe I SHOULD go to the zoo every year, b) my life is quite different from that last zoo trip, from where I live to where I work to the fact that I'm now a wife and mother, c) I like dedicating the day (or, in the case of last year, the long weekend) to spending the day with family and friends and d) I'm very lucky to have such amazing friends and family who have spent so many of my birthdays with me, either in actual attendance or in spirit and cheer. Here's to my 31st year - I'm hoping it's a great one!

The Easter egg hunt that wasn't

I really didn't care about Elle participating in any egg hunts this year. She's still too young to "get" it, and she's in super "MINE!" mode, so I figured if we instructed her to go out and try to get eggs that other kids were targeting, it would be a bit of a mixed message.

But one of our friend's church was hosting an Easter egg hunt in the park last weekend, and Tim was ADAMANT that Elle go to it and participate in the egg hunt. The weather was gorgeous, there were lots of other activities planned, and it's like 10 minutes from our house, so we woke her a bit early from her nap and headed out.

Our first glimpse at the set up was this:

That was just one of the fields, because there were several age groups, starting their hunts at different times. The youngest group was scheduled to go first, and we got a wristband for Elle and headed to check-in before the hunt. We were told several times that she wouldn't be allowed on the field in her stroller (I didn't realize we had a sign on the stroller saying our child was stuck there for the afternoon), and then after we'd waited in two lines (and kept the restless toddler strapped in her stroller until we could arrive on-time at her age-appropriate field), we were told that she wasn't allowed on the field at all. Apparently the 2-3 year age group got a little rough last year - mostly because of parents. So they were not allowing any child under two to participate in the actual egg hunt. She could claim a goodie bag, but no eggs would be hunted.

I was bummed and a bit irritated, but we took advantage of the situation and hit up the bounce houses (designated for younger kids, although I'm certain Elle, at 20 months, could have easily been trampled by the "younger kids") while the lines were short.

Then we checked out the free hot dogs, picked up a Elle's goodie bag, met the Easter Bunny, watched a clown show and just enjoyed the fresh air.

Elle spent the rest of the afternoon saying
"Hi Bunny" any time she saw him.

We utilized a strategy of one of us staying in line
for things while the other chased Elle around until
we reached the front of the line and reconvened.

Then we waited in line for face painting. Elle was extremely patient and kind of stunned by the whole experience.

Elle rockin' a purple butterfly.

After she was released from the face painting table, we trekked over to a playground at the park and she played some more. Needless to say, she slept extremely well that night :)

We hope you had a happy Easter!

Elle shows off some eggs from the Easter Bunny
(or, if you ask her, "Easter Money") after church.

Pumpkin festival :)

We've been wanting to go to this festival for the last few years, but because of schedules/weather/etc. we never made it out. I absolutely adore fall, so living in Florida is a bit rough - palm trees don't have leaves that change color, there's no crisp autumn air, the days of bundling up for Halloween parties/bar hopping/trick-or-treating don't exist. But this year we were determined to catch the spirit of Florida fall and planned to go to a smaller pumpkin festival nearby, but when Tim's employer gave out free tickets to the Hunsader Farms Pumpkin Festival, we decided we'd make the trek :)

I had a rough weekend, and it didn't exactly shock me when we were 10 minutes from the festival and I realized I'd left both of our cameras on our dining room table. Normally I'd throw our small point-and-shoot in the diaper bag, but since I was taking both cameras I figured I'd just keep them together in my camera bag. And then left it at home.

I was heartbroken but thankful for my cell phone camera - and it was nice to enjoy the day without really worrying about perfect photos ops. We're going to hit up the smaller festival next weekend to snag some must-take photos, but today was all about enjoying the amazing weather, eating festival food and taking advantage of my blunder to focus on our time as a family. We went on a hayride, bought a pumpkin, ate pumpkin ice cream and root beer floats, checked out the petting zoo, watched some fun musical acts, stopped by a circus show and met up with some friends.

Here are the few photos I took with my phone:

This shiny tractor pulled us during the hayride.

Watching the kids.

Big girl!

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Busch Gardens (P.S. Want to win something?)

Last week, I mentioned our trip to Busch Gardens.We had a ton of fun - there was a lot of concern that the weather would ruin the day, but the rain held off until we were almost home, and the overcast skies and windy weather actually made the park quite comfortable. We met up with all of my coworkers for our lunch, which was included in our ticket package, and other than that we pretty much just roamed the park on our own. Elle fell asleep in the gorilla exhibit - it was cool, dark and quiet - so she caught a much-needed afternoon nap that allowed us to spend the rest of the afternoon at the park without hysterical meltdowns.

Since we took Elle, we were kind of limited on the rides we could go on, which quite honestly was fine with us. We're not HUGE roller coaster people, and there are so many other things to do at Busch Gardens that we knew we'd be able to fill our day. I also think it was good that on our first trip there we weren't trying to cram as many coasters in to our day as possible - we could kind of scope out the scene for future trips sans kidlet(s) :)

Seeing the animals was a lot of fun - I fell in love with the hippos:

Elle tried - and fell in love with - cotton candy:

Elle was not so enamored by hay:

And a funny story: There's an awesome part of Busch Gardens that is Sesame Street-themed. There's a little water park area, several jungle gyms, rides and gift shops. All of the rides have rules about how tall your kid can be, what stage of development they have to be (sitting, standing, etc.) and other such things. One of the rules NOT stated on the signs? That you must be wearing shoes. It's Florida. Elle isn't walking yet. We don't do shoes. It would be one more thing to worry about losing in the park. On the merry-go-round, though, the operator told me that she could ride if she was wearing socks. He suggested that she could be wearing ANY socks. Like mine. So I took my socks off, and this is what you get:

As one other mother watching the scene told me: "You do what you gotta do." And now Elle has ridden on her first amusement park ride.

I've got a ton of photos from the day, but I'll leave you with these pages I designed with the My Memories Suite digital scrapbooking software.

OK, I lied - I'll leave you with a chance to win your own copy of the My Memories Suite software :) Follow this link to read my review and see how you can enter to win. There's also a sweet discount code that will save you up to $20 on software and products.

Wordless Wednesday: Fuzzy and feathered friends

My company paid for all of the employees and their families to go to Busch Gardens on Saturday. Here are some photos of Elle meeting some special pals:

More from our trip to Busch Gardens to come!