My Birthday Celebration Extraordinaire!

My wonderful husband did an excellent job on my 24th birthday! I've added the pictures to our web albums, for those who are interested. I was told I couldn't come in the apartment until 5:15 so I sat in the car for a few minutes when I got home. When I came upstairs there was a sign on the door that said "Wecome to Amy's 24th Birthday Celebration Extraordinaire! Please come on in!" So, I did.

There was Happy, in the kitchen, dressed as my waiter and cooking our spaghetti dinner as "I Will Be Here" by Steven Curtis Chapman played in the background. He had emailed his mom to get her recipe for meat sauce and had that simmering as he was cooking the spaghetti. However, when I walked in, he had a large pot nearly filled with water on a small burner with the noodles already in the water (which had not yet boiled). I asked if the water had boiled yet and he said, "No, that's not what the instructions said to do." Perplexed, I pulled out the instructions which read "Bring 4 quarts of water to a rapid boil" as the first step. I read it out loud and he explained that he thought that meant it wouldn't take that long for it to come to a boil... Like.... it would boil in hardly any time at all. After a long, hard laugh, we removed the noodles, moved the water to a larger burner and covered the pot. From then on, things went pretty smoothly.

As we waited for the water to boil, I opened my present--a craft organizer! I had mentioned that I wanted to get one of these a while back and Happy remembered this. There is a compartment for paper which Happy filled with some Hawaiian-designed papers and stickers for me to use for our Hawaii anniversary trip in July! It was wrapped in some lovely sports-themed wrapping paper (from Happy's birthday in August), and placed on our coffee table.

Dessert was strawberry shortcake (YUM)! Happy pulled out the shortcakes (bought pre-made from the grocery store) and the container of whole strawberries and the Cool Whip. Holding up the strawberries, he said "I'm probably supposed to do something with these, huh?" So he held up the strawberry and pointed the knife at it in a position that inspired me to offer to cut up the strawberries for our shortcakes. They were delicious and I even got to blow out a candle. Below is the video of that.

After dinner, Happy cleaned up and we got ready for Bible study where they sang Happy Birthday to me (for the fourth time yesterday), had cupcakes (made by Emily) and gave several cards with kind words and a gift card to Olive Garden! Emily also gave me a scrapbook with a palm tree on it for our trip to Hawaii :-) Apparently she and Happy had been conspiring for a couple weeks! Oh, and of course my sister sent me some beautiful yellow flowers at work :-) I got phone calls and e-cards and cards in the mail and even a letter from my brother in boot camp! I had a great birthday! Thank you to everyone for making me feel so loved!