Its My Birthday Too, Yeah!

This last weekend we celebrated my 31st birthday. Being 31 feels a lot older than being 30 for some reason. We had a great weekend. Friday night I got to play cards with some of my buddies from church. Saturday during the day was full of family time - my parents were in town to help us celebrate. In the morning we watched our middle M play soccer - he had a quite a game including a little shoving match with a boy from the other team. I think we caught it on video but haven't gone back to check yet. Before our oldest M's soccer game in the early afternoon I got to enjoy a few games of air hockey and Go Fish with the kids. The afternoon soccer game was toasty - seems like summertime decided to come back again. Our daughter fell down early in the game and the dust from the ground mixed with the sunscreen and sweat to form a nice dust beard. I helped her wipe it off during a break from the game so she could get back to looking a little more lady like.

Around 5 o'clock we headed to the north side of town for a surprise dinner - a Japanese Steakhouse where they cook the food on a massive hibachi grill right in front of you. Our friends Greg and Chas met us there and brought their two girls. It was Greg and my dad's first time to enjoy this type of cooking show and the entire group enjoyed watching the chef work his magic. He added a new trick that I had never seen before - a volcano of onion rings. The kids were scared of the fire when they saw it at other tables but had a great time once our chef got going.

Some of the cooking highlights were:
1) Chef juggling an egg on his spatula and then catching it on the side of the utensil so that the shell cracked and held on to the edge and the edible part fell on to the grill and started to cook for the fried rice (while preparing breakfast the next morning Papa and our oldest M had to be reminded that this trick needed to be left to the professionals)
2) Chef butterflying several shrimp in rapid succession and then flipping the last tail into the top of his hat
3) Chef making fire dance across the grill - he even got some of it on his hand to show us that it really wouldn't hurt us - both sets of parents with small kids secretly wished that he hadn't shared that trick
4) Flipping knives and spatulas without losing any appendages (again maybe not the best thing to teach the youngsters)

I generally try to use chopsticks when eating at Chinese or Japanese restaurants and was able to eat everything on this evening with these fun utensils except for the soup and ice cream (didn't even try it). To top of the massive meal, Chas brought a birthday cake (yellow with chocolate frosting) and Papa served us each a slice. It was yummy.

It was an awesome birthday weekend.

By the way, the pictures in this post were from a year ago (that explains why I still have hair in the pictures - no, I didn't grow it back out) but I just stubbled across them today. We still don't have a digital camera so digital pictures are a little hit and miss but I think they add a lot to the blog. These are from my office at work - Melinda brought our middle M up to visit me while his big sister was a school. As you can tell, we had a blast but I don't recall getting much work done this day.