the boy got older

This year JP's birthday fell smack dab in the middle of a really chaotic week in our lives.  For me it was my very last week as a graduate student, last exams and wrap up lecture on the real world and on the outrageous debt we have all accumulated.  My whole family came in from out of town for the weekend, and I really didn't want his birthday to get missed in the kerfuffle.

As has become tradition, every year for JP's birthday I make him a birthday sign.  This year I believe I outdid myself in sheer nerdery and ridiculousness.  In the hub bub of the crazy week it came together in pieces.  The mutant turtles were colored expertly by Julia and my self whilst at the bar celebrating passing our last exams of grad school.  Although our server was nice about it, he totally thought we were weird.  No matter though, cause these things needed to be colored!

Anyway, as the timing happened, almost my entire family rolled in to Portland on the morning of JP's birthday, so we all got to celebrate together!  I arranged a surprise gathering of sorts at one of our favorite bars in the Old Port right after work.  It turned out that the work day had been unexpectedly extremely stressful, and when JP looked up from his desk at 6:01 to commiserate with his favorite co-workers, he was a little bummed to see that they had already bolted from the building.  But, I picked him up and we walked over to find them all gathered on the deck with our other Portland friends, drinks in hand ready to celebrate him.  It was great and he was totally surprised! For some reason the only picture I have of the whole event is my brother Joe hopping on his bike before we rode down to grab a table.  So here it is, in all its anti climactic glory.

In any case, post bar celebration we all piled over to the house my parents rented for the weekend, and whipped up a delicious fresh lobster dinner!  I think this was the turning point of exhaustion in the week for me because additionally I didn't really get any pictures of this portion of the celebration either.  I did however manage to get a terrible picture of JP's birthday cake, which was dirt cake, his very favorite kind.  (And ahem, just so you know, I didn't even make it with the crappy gluten free "oreos" that I trialed, holy crap, four ((!)) years ago?!... I used the real thing.  Now that's love!)

Other then that we all just hung out, caught up, and helped my little brother with a twitter pun competition in coming up with our best monster puns before retiring for the evening.  Totally normal birthday.