All-weekend birthday extravaganza.

It began on Friday when my lovely visiting teacher offered to babysit our kids so that Tim and I could go out for my birthday. We've been saving a P.F. Chang's gift card for over a year now so we opted to make the entire night a freebie and use it. There was some big sporting event going on downtown unebenownst to us and, wanting to snag a free parking spot, we ended up parking about a 15 minute walk away from BoDo (you know, like SoHo except on a small-town scale), where the restaurant was. By the time we got there and asked for a table, they said the wait would be an hour and a half. Not wanting to stick our babysitters with four kids way past their bedtime, we nixed Plan A and raced back to the car to scour it for coupons. Yes, even my birthday can't chase the cheapskate out of me. We ended up at a Boise icon, Big Jud's. It's way less than classy, in fact, it's one of those places where if you eat the special you get your picture on the wall. Seriously cool. 45 minutes, a Malibu chicken sandwich, onion rings, and a chocolate shake later, we headed home to pick up our lovely children.
Saturday, my actual birthday was less than eventful. A couple hours after waking up, my brother Eric called. Upon hearing his voice, I realized that he was, of course calling to wish me a "Happy Birthday". I had forgotten! And apparently, so had Tim because he was already at Lowe's picking up a new dishwasher to install at our rental property, without having mentioned a word about birthdays. No biggie - I cleaned house, listened to living prophets and apostles speak all morning and afternoon and then spent some time next door at a fondue party with the ladies during priesthood session while a dozen kids partied at our house with a couple of babysitters.
Sunday we baked my birthday cake first thing in the morning and settled down for another day of General Conference. Can't complain that my birthday falls on Conference weekend regularly. The entire weekend was wonderful. Not a lot of fanfare, just relaxing with friends and family - what more could I ask? Speaking of which, here are a few pics of some of the ones I love.