Happy Birthday to My Sweetheart!

A very happy 27th birthday to my dear husband! His birthday was Sunday, and we spent all weekend celebrating! We enjoyed a fun and wonderful date night on Friday with birthday dinner provided by his mom (Thanks, JoBeth!) and movie provided by my sis and her husband (Thanks, Matt & Jess!). We ate at a Waco institution called El Siete Mares, a Mexican seafood restaurant. Justin seriously had 8 different kinds of seafood on his plate, including oyster, shrimp, crawfish, squid, mussels, scallops, and octopus. GAG! He enjoyed it, though. I had the much tamer Pecan-Crusted Rainbow Trout. YUM!! I've never had fish like this before - it was delicious. Then we saw The Pursuit of Happyness, the new Will Smith movie. SOOOO GOOOD!!!! It comes highly recommended by me - bring your tissues. The chemistry that Will Smith has with his son onscreen is really moving.

Then Saturday we had an at-home celebration. UK men's basketball was playing at Louisville, Justin's most hated rival, and thankfully the game was on one of the 5 channels we get at home! So I made some homemade whole wheat pizzas, and we totally chowed down as we enjoyed watching the Wildcats crush the Cardinals. Then for dinner, I made him a pumpkin cheesecake, and that's all we had - we were still full from the pizza!

Sunday evening was our church LifeGroup's Christmas party, and we had a Mexican Stack-Up and a white elephant gift exchange. Fun times were had by all. I also gave Justin his birthday present, which is a pretty funny story. Since I don't have much to do at work today, I'll tell the story. I've got a picture I'm going to post with it, but I forgot to upload it, so check back tomorrow to see the picture of Justin with his birthday present.

OK, so here's the story. I got Justin a pack of 50 pencils for his birthday. What's the big deal about that? you may ask. Well, since childhood, Justin has had this mannerism where he flips something with his fingers. It's actually a pretty neat skill, and I've never seen anyone else that can do it the way he can. It must be innate. He'll flip pencils, pens, markers, whatever is nearby. However, he found one certain type of Eagle brand pencils that was the perfect weight for flipping. But then his life was changed forever when Eagle stopped making the pencils the same way. They changed from wood to some plastic substance, and it changed the weight of the pencils - no longer ideally flippable. So he went online and bought every pencil that he could find that was the old style. (Side note: In college, he was helping me move one time, and he found a box of Eagle pencils as we were packing up my office stuff. He freaked out and got so excited that I was a little creeped out. It turned out that they were the right ones, and so he asked if he could have them. He's never forgotten my generosity in giving him that box of pencils, and it may have added to why he wanted to marry me years later.) So he had a pretty large stash of flippable pencils, but as you know, when things fly through the air at a high rate of speed, they're apt to break. So over the years, Justin's stash has been dwindling as the pencils break, and he didn't know what he would do when they were all gone. Fast forward to last month. Here at the church where I work, they had a Women's Conference, and afterward they had a bunch of supplies left over. So they gave each of us secretaries a bag with a t-shirt, some pens, some candy, and some pencils. When I saw the pencils, the thought crossed my mind You know, these are pretty heavy pencils, maybe they'll work for Justin. I left them out for him when I went to work the next morning. When I got home from work that day, there he was on the couch flipping the pencil from the Women's Conference! He said "Where did you get these pencils?!" I told him, and he said "Can you get me some more? These are perfect!!!" He was incredibly happy. So for his birthday, I got him a pack of 50 from the Oriental Trading Company. They come with a free engraving, so on the side of his pencils it says "Justin's - DO NOT SHARPEN!" He was thrilled with that gift. My sweetheart. :)