Happy Birthday!

Let me start out with telling you that I have come to the realization that birthdays are such fun to plan for your spouse.  I have been thinking about my husbands birthday and planning it since before we were married.  Plans changed many times over, but that's okay.  The end result was a celebration to remember, as his birthday as a married man!

My sweet husband had his birthday on August 28th!  I am thankful for the many years the Lord has blessed this man with.  As a baby, there were some scary times due to his health.  This causes me to be all the more grateful to have him now.  Needless to say, he is healthy now!

Growing up, neither of us were the go-to-a-restaurant-for-your-birthday type folk.  We were blessed with mothers who cooked far better then any restaurant we would ever find.  The special-ness of our birthdays were that we got to choose our birthday meal.  Smart, and food lovin', man that my husband is, he sweet talked his mother into changing the tradition to be three special means for his birthday.  Who was I to change the tradition my husband had grown to love so much?

The problem was, we weren't even going to be home for his birthday.  He had a business trip in Ohio.  I was able to go, which was wonderful, and so we celebrated that day via his per diam check.

His breakfast meal came before the trip.  He loves cheese, and especially cream cheese.  His birthday request had always been monkey bread.  Knowing his love for cream cheese, I decided try gorilla bread...cream cheese stuffed monkey bread.  We didn't really see its ties to monkey bread, but it was delicious none-the-less.  I put a candle in it though, and well...it melted more on the bottom, then the top.  His actual birthday simple consisted of some balloons when he got back from classes.  His birthday lunch consisted of the simplicity of cheese raviolis with parmesean cheese on them.  I didn't use any fancy recipe on them, we just ate them plane and simple.  He actually fixed this meal, as I got home from work at 6:25 and had to be to Bible study at 6:45.

Birthday dinner was our big celebration...stuffed hamburgers.  Something he grew up with as a special meal was cream cheese (yes, it comes up again) stuffed hamburgers!  At times, they would even put mushrooms in them.  This was his birthday, and we were celebrating it up big, so we did the mushrooms and cream cheese.  Grilled (as much as you can with a George Foreman in an apartment complex) hamburgers with a side of homemade crab rangoons was our celebration on Monday night.

[Side Story: For those of you who do not know, we lived out a long distance relationship for our four years before marriage.  One of the problems with this, was not being able to bake anything for his birthday.  The first birthday he had after we started dating, I decided to still bake him his favorite kind of cake...chocolate.  He of course wasn't around to eat it though, so my family suffered through having to eat it instead.  I made sure to take lots of pictures to send to him, but I wasn't all that mean.  I gave him an "IOU" coupon to redeem at any point when we were together.  This year was the first time he had ever been able to try some of my homemade chocolate cake, made from scratch just for him!]

I was sad when this was all done, because I enjoyed planning and celebrating.  In my humble opinion, my husband deserves celebrating, and so was a delight to have an excuse.  It did open my eyes to the fact of not needing an excuse.  It was so much fun, I think I will have to do it more often throughout the year, and not just on his birthday!