Best Birthday Gift Ever...well almost

For some reason, this year I wanted to do something really special for my birthday. I thought about it and I decided I wanted to go to Phoenix, AZ to visit my best friend Melissa. I haven't seen her for a couple of years and was really missing her. When I told Jake this, he said cool but I wanna come too. We looked into the cost of the 3 of us flying down, renting a car, and all that and decided it was a little out of our budget. Needless to say, I was bummed until Jake came up with an awesome alternative. He suggested we buy Melissa a plane ticket to fly up here instead since we'd only have to pay for one person and wouldn't have all the extra expenses. What a brilliant guy! The next step of course, was to get Melissa on board so I called and suggested my idea to her and she immediately called her hubby Blake. He was all for it and even took work off to stay home with their 4 oldest kids (her youngest munchkin came with her). What a couple of lucky girls we are to have these wonderful hubbies! So, the trip was planned, the plane ticket bought, and the waiting game began.

Contrary to what I felt, the day FINALLY arrived for Melissa's visit. I couldn't believe it was actually all coming together and something wasn't going to come up to keep it from happening. Oh, me of little faith! It did happen, she did come, and I received the best birthday present ever - a weekend with my 2 best friends (Jake, of course being the other BFF). It doesn't get any better than that. The weekend was awesome, silly fun but waaaaayyyy to short.

Since Melissa and I met as roommates when we attended Ricks College together, we naturally had to go to Rexburg and visit our old stomping grounds. We ate way too much, laughed ourselves silly, stayed up super late every night, shopped for awesome bargains (gotta love the D.I. - check out our sweaters we bought in the picture below) and just let go all - well most - of our regular mommy/wife/chauffeur/errand runner/etc. duties. Good times, really good times.

On my actual birthday, some of mine and Jake's family were able to come help me celebrate with dinner at Big Jud's. Yummy! (I LOVE their french fries with fry sauce. If you haven't had fry sauce, you definitely need to - go ahead, put that on your bucket list.) What wonderful family and friends I have!





And Melissa, thank you for indulging me and being so willing to come and make my birthday the best yet. Well, okay, since I got engaged on my birthday 10 years ago maybe I should go with 2nd best...and then there was the time when I turned 18 and my parents, flew me to Chicago with my sister to see Donny Osmond live in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat - that birthday was super awesome....and then last year when I turned 30 and celebrated my first birthday as a mom - that was really special... How about we say, this birthday was in the definite top 5? Yep, definitely way up there in the top 5 and when you consider top 5 out of 32, that's pretty good, right?