Weekending- Celebrating the birthday boy

Linking up with Holly and Sarah for Hello Monday

We had a nice weekend celebrating the birthday boy and the end of a long week.

I subbed on Friday. It was the first time this year that I subbed at our district's intermediate school which is the school I sub at the most. I enjoyed seeing all the teachers and staff whom I know there and the sub job ended up being almost all good so no complaints. 

Friday was Donnie's birthday. He is up to his eyeballs in work so he couldn't leave work early to enjoy his day. I went out and got his favorite pizza for dinner. He was able to get in a short nap after dinner before we left for Alyssa's cross country meet in Mason.  Her race wasn't until 8:45 pm so darkness had just descended completely when she ran. She improved her time from last week and her team ended up coming in 7th place out of, I'm not sure how many- probably close to twenty. The varsity boys ran after the girls and came in first place again (as they did last week!)- the season is looking so bright for them. Hopefully they don't get derailed by injury. The bus didn't arrive back at the high school until around 11:15 pm! So, so late for these kids (and some parents)... whose school day started very early that morning. We stayed up to wait for Alyssa to come home from the high school and then we crashed.

At cross country- I brought my Nikon and hoped to get some good pictures but unfortunately to get low light action shots, I need a much better lens for my camera than I possess. At the photo taking stage that I'm in right now, I can't see myself making the investment. Cell phone photos are going to have to do: this was the final stretch...

Oh boy,  I see this picture and all I can think about is how I want to buy a new lens for my Nikon (probably not going to happen but this really makes me want one!).

After the race, we caught up with Alyssa and some of her CC friends.

This is 48- the birthday boy didn't get to see any of this kids until after 9:00 pm on his birthday ;(. (He technically saw Alyssa earlier before school and work but that was only for about thirty seconds; Alyssa's timing in the morning is sacrosanct; spending QT time with parents before school does not making the timing cut...)

Saturday, Donnie had a board meeting in Dayton and then he stayed in his office for a while to do more work. Alyssa slept in- it's the first Saturday she'd been able to sleep in since early July due to having early morning Saturday cross country practices since July. Alyssa and I ran some errands and made Donnie's birthday cake- a chocolate eclair cake. It's really more like we assembled his cake- there's no baking and it only took us about ten minutes to do.

Saturday evening, we went to a friend's house to eat dinner and watch a movie on their outdoor movie projector. We had so much fun but stayed out way too late!

Our friend's birthday was a couple of weeks prior so I got a cake and was going to have the baker write two names on it. But the surface area for writing was so small so I just had the person write Donnie's name (since his birthday was the day before). When I saw how small the writing was, I realized that I could have gotten our friend's name on it. 

Nicole and me

Sunday morning was church followed by getting ready to have people over to celebrate Donnie's birthday. Jacob came up from Cincinnati to go to dinner with us. We went to a restaurant for an early dinner with some of Donnie's extended family and then everyone came back to our house for dessert. The birthday boy felt loved!

I don't eat cake often but when I do, having it for breakfast is a bonus. I took this picture to send to Nicole. She knows I like pop and bought these adorable mini cans of Coke Zero Starlight and insisted that I take them home. I told her it was the best breakfast ever- maybe a slight exaggeration but it was a good breakfast.

We celebrated three birthdays- Donnie, his sister Denise and her husband Don all have birthdays close to each other so we celebrated all three. Speaking of three, three of the people at the birthdays celebration were named Donald. So 3/11's were Donalds ;).

Jacob and Donnie

Jacob and Denise