Aww, you guys...

Your birthday memories are great!  Thank you so much for sharing. 

My day has been fairly quiet.  Spent a little time with my little sister today and she brought me a surprise cake for my birthday.  She was inspired to make a variation of a dump cake.  Our mom always made dump cake with cherry pie filling, canned peaches, and yellow cake mix.  Yummy.  My sister made this one with apple pie filling, canned pears, and a carrot cake mix (because they didn't have a spice cake, but that's all carrot cake is really).  It was so good. 

I ordered a pizza for dinner.  Pizza is kind of a birthday tradition for me, and I'll tell you the story behind it since I asked you to share a birthday memory and it's only fair for me to do the same.  This one is funny now, but at the time it really wasn't.  It's a good thing we can always look back and things and find the humor in them.

When I turned 31, things were not all that great in our little family.  We had a really rough year or so.... we tried moving to Massachusetts and it was a failure, we had a surprise Isabelle and that was a miserable pregnancy, and my husband and I just really weren't getting along all that well.  (Obviously, we got through it and things are better now... )  Poor Bill had actually forgotten my 30th birthday the year before, and pretty much had forgotten about this birthday as well until one of my friends called him up to remind him.  I think he was really frustrated about forgetting it (again).  I didn't hear from him all day and when I got home from work, he said, "Your birthday present is on the stove."  No "Happy Birthday" or anything.  So I went to see what was one the stove and it was half of a pizza.  It didn't really go over all that well.

And he has yet to live it down.  Every year since then, when my birthday rolls around, jokes about half-eaten pizzas abound.  He even tried to get half a pizza delivered to me at work last year, but the pizza place wouldn't do it.  Like I said, it's funny now....

Now, in my husband's defense... He's not so good at remembering what day it is, so holidays and anniversaries and birthdays kind of get lost in the mix.  He's gotten Valentine's Day and Presidents Day confused.... he thought today was Dec. 3 for the first part of the day... it's not that he doesn't want to show his appreciation for me on special days, he just can't remember when they are.  But he is excellent at just showing up out of the blue with flowers and doing little small things to let me know he appreciates me on just plain normal days.  That's what really counts, to me anyway.