Well on the plus side, I’m still closer to being born than I am to reaching retirement age.  On the downside, I think I have less hair now than when I was born, so I need to start looking for hats.  My birthday this year was not quite the event that Katie’s was, seeing that 32 just doesn’t quite have the gravitas to it that 40 does, or 4 for that matter, but still it was a good day.  Dex was mostly recovered from his strep throat by then (he was so good, he’d even remind us when we forgot to give him his antibiotic), and Michelle had arrived, so things were finally starting to calm down.

We planned an unambitous day – we got up a little early and hit the Mountlake Terrace pool for some free swim time (I challenged Katie to get us to the early bird special swim and with typical drill sargent flare, she did just that), went home to pick up Michelle, then went to the farmer’s market, and finally, FINALLY, we went home so I could get my presents.  Actually, I’d gotten one present a few days earlier.  The boys and I were playing with planes, and were fighting over our 1 aircraft carrier, and I got exasperated and yelled, “We need another aircraft carrier!”  Then I went to find something I could fashion into a makeshift carrier.  I thought about trying the whole “iceberg aircraft carrier“ approach, but I didn’t think Katie would let me.  Katie comes out, stares at me, says, “Wait here”, and goes upstairs to wrap a present.  She comes down a few minutes later with a present, from “the boys”.  They sing me “Happy Birthday”, and then we tear into it and find that we have another aircraft carrier.  Yeah!  My birthday starts with a present I’d have loved when I was 4!  It came with 6 little planes, and Nic and Dex promptly split them up between themselves.

On my actual birthday, I got my “big” present, which was even cooler – the Lego mission control set, with an Atlas 5!  A few minutes later, Michelle gave me a Lego set of the Space Needle.  The next day, I got an unmarked package in the mail, which contained another lego spaceship.  And after a confirmation phone call with Don, learned there was a second package on its way, and indeed that one arrived the next day, also filled with legos.  So on the one hand, every present I got was pretty much a present to the boys.  And on the other hand, it’s awesome.  Hopefully they’re into legos for years, so I don’t have to look weird for playing with them.

So all told, it wasn’t a very loud event, but it was good.  The boys were happy, the pool was fun, the farmers market was, well, crowded and a bit of a pain, but then I got Legos so all is well.  We spent hours making the rockets, and finally finished making the last of them this last weekend.  The boys let me play with the rocket set, but they claimed the space ships for themselves.  Oh well, at least there are 3 of those, so I can always steal one…