Happy Birthday Caroline!  Sharing a birthday weekend with you is one of my favorite things.  I cannot wait to celebrate with you tonight.  My lovely other half will be guest posting tomorrow (scheduled obviously) because we will be enjoying mimosas and cinnamon rolls and planning out a day of our favorite things.

Birthdays are a strange thing.  When I was a little girl, I loved my birthday – what kid doesn’t?  As a teenager and in college, I didn’t love it as much.  I didn’t like it for the same reason that wedding showers freaked me out.  I don’t like when everyone is staring at me.  I get super awkward and my whole face turns red and I kind of want to crawl under a rug.

I always had expectations of what a birthday should be because of what my friends did or received and mine never turned out that way.  One of my high school boyfriends dumped me on my birthday.  In college, we had already left for the summer when it came time for my birthday, so I usually only hung out with a few close friends.  I just felt like there was so much pressure to celebrate in some crazy awesome way, but I didn’t know what to do.

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This all changed 8 years ago.

Our office had a tradition of singing Happy Birthday to you and giving you a Hawaiian lei to wear for the day.  I would always take my birthday off because I was hung over to avoid being sung to.  In 2005, they decided to get me anyways and sing to me the next day.  RUDE.  They found me and sang the whole song and I’m sure my face was turned magenta and then they gave me an option of a pink necklace or a green necklace.  I took green.

They went off to torture the next person who was some guy I didn’t know very well that worked in the kitchen department.  Sorry I took the green necklace dude, you got stuck with pink.  Since I was feeling extra feisty, I wished this strange boy a happy birthday and gave him a hard time about his beautiful pink necklace.  A week later, we went to a Twin’s game.

This isn’t from that day – but I found an old picture w/ us in Hawaiian Leis – give me some credit.
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Here we are now celebrating our birthdays together.  Mine is the 24th and his is the 25th.  (Sorry, this is mushy).  Celebrating something like a birthday with your best friend is A MILLION TIMES BETTER than celebrating yourself.  Spending two days in a row doing all of our favorite things is something I look forward to all month.

In the last two years, I have made some new friends and we’ve added 2 more to the birthday mix – Caroline and Kinzie – and that makes it even better.  Now there is a whole weekend of fun things planned with lots of different groups of friends to celebrate.  The fun starts tonight.