birthday – Page 4 – If we had a Marriage, These Would be its Thoughts

Corinne's 6th Birthday

March 20, 2021 11:02 am

Corinne celebrated her second pandemic birthday this week.

She had a treasure hunt at lunch time to find her presents.

I had to go on site to work for the afternoon. While I was gone Jess helped Corinne construct that Lego set. When I got home Corinne and I played with it all the way until dinner time.

Corinne's requested dinner, the best dinner she could ever imagine, was spaghetti with alfredo sauce and mashed potatoes. We offered to include toast (one of her most loved foods), but she turned it down because when she has two things on her plate that she really loves (toast and spaghetti) she'll only eat one of them and then be full without getting to enjoy the other. We suggested having less of each to be able to enjoy both, but she turned that down too; too risky.

After dinner was cake. Corinne was very excited about the nightlight ladybug thing she received, so it needed to pose with her.

Chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and a vanilla (but pink colored) mousse filling. Decorated with Hershey kisses around the edge, one of her favorite candies.

On Friday we took the afternoon off for a trip to the zoo. We were all pretty wiped out though. Not sure if it was from the time change or a year of incredibly sedentary lifestyle or both, but we only covered about 1/3 of the zoo before coming home. Corinne's favorite part was riding the gondola to the top where the bears, bison, wolves, and eagles are. Those animals weren't her favorite, the gondola ride itself was her favorite.

Heather's Birthday 2020

November 10, 2020 7:41 pm

With Heather's birthday we've now celebrated the entire family's birthdays for 2020 in quarantine.

Her birthday was a work & school day. Much of the day was spent trying to get Heather to complete her school work so we could move on to fun activities. We eventually got on with things and the requisite treasure hunt was a big hit. This year's hunt involved playing a custom-coded guessing game on the computer, decoding a message encrypted using a substitution cipher, some math word problems, and completing some electronic circuitry.

Birthday dinner was McDonald's cheeseburgers (because what could be better than that?). Then she opened presents before having cake. Corinne thought up and picked out a Toothless stuffed animal (the dragon from "How to Train your Dragon") to give her and Heather is enamored of it. She puts one of her old nightgowns on it at night to keep it warm and it travels with her throughout the house during the day.

This year's cake was a white cake with vanilla-cream filling, chocolate frosting, and decorated with Andes mints. Unfortunately, like last year, she wasn't particularly thrilled with it. So she'll have to pick another new cake next year.

While we were eating cake she seemed a bit down. After some probing she admitted to having been a bit let down by her gifts. She liked them all, but was hoping for some Je-ne-sais-quoi delight that didn't materialize. And I know the feeling. I've had that experience too. It's not that there's some particular thing that you're hoping for (otherwise you could say so and increase your chances). You're just hoping for some unexpected surprise and it doesn't always happen (nor is it always specifically hoped for either). Some language probably has a word for it.

We'll see if we can land a hit at Christmas. I spent some time looking for ideas and think I found something that will fit the bill.

Jess' Birthday 2020

September 26, 2020 10:47 am

Jess wanted to go to the beach for her birthday. So we packed into the van with our social-bubble buddies and headed out to Half Moon Bay. We pre-ordered some sandwiches from Subway and ate lunch next to the ocean.

The girls had a blast playing in the water and people were generally pretty good about distancing and mask wearing. The parking lot was full, but it didn't feel really crowded. Maybe that's because it was foggy and you couldn't see very far down the length of the beach.

Corinne eventually got cold and fell asleep hunched over on the sand.

Then she decided that on me was the only acceptable place to rest.

Once we'd had our fill of the beach we went to get gelato. This was a tactical mistake. The gelato shop was up the road away from the route home. And the way back was bumper-to-bumper traffic of people trying to head home from the coast.

So a short gelato trip added over an hour of additional drive time to get home (which is only about 1 hour anyway). But we eventually got home at which point it was dinner time. We had to parallelize our remaining celebrations in order to get things done in time for the girls' bedtime. Jess got the girls bathed while I heated up some chicken strips for them to eat. Then Jess blew out candles (all 40 of them!) on the cake I made and opened presents. By that time our dinner order was ready so I went to pick that up while Jess got the girls in bed.

Jess decided that my birthday cake is so good that she should have it for her birthday too. So that's the cake I made--chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, complete with Kyle's special, vanilla-cream filling.

And that's 3 of 4 family birthdays this year celebrated under the ongoing stay-at-home order and it looks like Heather's will be the same.

Kyle's Birthday 2020

June 14, 2020 12:34 pm

After celebrating Corinne's birthday at the very start of the quarantine I honestly didn't think we'd still be quarantined by the time my birthday rolled around. But here we are.

I started my day by working in my closet. Then lunch in the kitchen and back to my closet for more work. Very exciting.

Once I was done with work, I opened presents:

Here Heather is using her "Poison Rod" to protect me.

The girls gave me new sets of miniatures to use in our Dragon Strike games. Corinne here has her "Fire & Ice staff."

Jess gave me a set of fancy vanilla extracts: Tahitian, Mexican, and Madagascar Bourbon types. I need to come up with a dish to make to let us taste test them.

A careful observer might wonder why the box on the right says "VHS" on it. That's the Stranger Things seasons 1 & 2 sets which are packaged to look like 80s-style tapes.

After presents I picked up some Mexican food for dinner from Anita's Tacqueria. Since no one else likes Mexican food, Jess made pasta for everyone else. After dinner we needed some time to digest before having cake. So I played a video game for a little while.

We didn't have enough candles, so I told Jess to use a binary representation. Since the cake is facing me you have to read the binary backwards. So the right-most candle represents a "one" for 32 then there are 3 "zeroes" for 16, 8, & 4 and finally 2 "ones" for 2 & 1.

After dessert the girls headed off to bed and Jess and I watched the 1971 classic movie The Andromeda Strain.

Corinne's 5th Birthday

March 18, 2020 7:53 pm

Even with the world melting down, not everything stops. So on Tuesday we celebrated Corinne's birthday. Normally I would pare down the number of pictures I include in a post, but I think right now we could all use a little extra unbridled joy.

She had an absolutely fantastic day. After lunch she did her first birthday-treasure-hunt. Heather read the clues for her and she made mad dashes around the house to find the next thing as she solved each rhyme.

Once the presents were discovered in the bench we headed back inside to open them.

After presents I had to "go" back to work (meaning, hide in my closet/office). When I "got home" at the end of the day we had dinner and then it was time for the pink cake.