January Happenings

For Chris' 25th birthday earlier this month, I surprised him by gathering some of our friends for dinner at Bruno's (a local Italian restaurant in W. Lafayette). Some of our church friends and the Parker's (Chris' family friend since he was a kid) were able to join us. It was fun because I was actually able to surprise him. He was thinking for a few days about where he wanted to go for his birthday dinner since we had already been to Cracker Barrel with my parents in Joplin. (In past years we normally end up going to Cracker Barrel for his birthday.) So the day of his dinner (Jan. 10th), right before I walked out the door with the dog, I said that we were leaving at 6:30 that night and he could no longer decide where we were going. I strategically planned it this way so he couldn't interrogate me about what I had just said. When I got back he was questioning why he couldn't pick where we went, but I told him "just because".

So we left at 6:30 and I directed him to Bruno's. When the hostess told us where our table was, he was confused as he saw there wasn't an empty table and that some of our friends were there. He finally caught on that it was a surprise. We enjoyed having dinner with our friends before we invited everyone back to our house for cake and games. It was strange because everyone that came is significantly older than us - at least 10-12 years older with the Parker's being old enough to be our parents. Nevertheless, we had a wonderful time and I was glad that everyone could make it to celebrate Chris' birthday.

Over MLK weekend, we headed down to Columbus to celebrate Chris' birthday (again) and Dominik's, which was on the 29th. It also gave us something to do since we had a 3-day weekend for MLK day. We enjoyed spending time with everyone there. I even went to a John David Webster benefit concert at Chris' family's church on Saturday night. It ends up that John was the interim worship leader at their church for a while, so he came back to do a benefit concert for the pregnancy care center. It was fun since I haven't been to any sort of concert in quite some time. While we were there we also lit some candles for Dominik to blow out. Instead of putting them in a cake (which we knew he would spit on), we used a crescent roll! But once the candles were lit, he started crying. So that was the end of that. But Chris' mom made a wonderful german chocolate cake that we enjoyed all weekend.