Happy Birthday Justin!

Today is Justin's birthday! Happy Birthday to my handsome hunk of a hubby!! 27 years ago, the world became a better place!

Justin at age one:

I tease him and say that 27 rounds up to 30, but last night he had a wonderful insight: I'll never have to worry about him leaving me for a younger woman, because I AM the younger woman ;)

Yesterday Justin got a very awesome birthday present in the form of an email notification. He has been moved to a Level 1 official in the Arizona High School Basketball world! This means he will be reffing ONLY varsity games (it also means a pay increase per game) Yahoo!!

Then this morning before he left for work (at 5am) I gave him the present from me so he could take it to work to show his friends. About a month ago Justin emailed me with links to some team flags on sports-fans websites. There were three that he wanted: BYU, Oakland A's, and Oakland Raiders. The point of the email was for me to tell family members and friends that this is what he wanted. When I saw how much they cost, however, I decided to just do something about it on my own.

All three would have cost about $70, plus shipping. That's just plain ridiculous. Instead, I went to Hobby Lobby and got some fabric, all of which totaled $7.50. After a few naptimes worth of work, the result was...




Tah dah! I know they're not perfect, but they're close enough, and I'm pretty proud of them! They're each about 2 feet by 3 feet and Justin will be proudly displaying them on the wall in the garage (his man room).

Carrie got him a change jar that has a digital counter on the top. When you drop the coins in, it adds up the total. He's had a change jar in the closet for a while, but now he'll always know exactly how much is in there. When we put it all in this afternoon, it totaled $15! It's amazing how much loose change adds up to!

A side story, that has nothing to do with Justin's birthday except for the fact that it happened today... This morning, Carrie and I were out grocery shopping. When I first started the van, it sounded a teeny bit funny, but started right away. We went to two different stores (because I actually looked at the ads this week and decided to be money conscious). While starting the van to head from the first store to the second store, it sounded a little bit more funny and took a few seconds to actually start up.

By the time we went to go home from the second store, all it did was click, click, click, click..... :( So now I was stuck in a parking lot, pregnant, with a 20 month old strapped into her carseat, milk and yogurt in the back and a non-functioning van. I think I was kind of expecting it, but it was still annoying. Luckily, we had a rain storm last night so the temperature was only 85 (although the humidity was high), and also, we were at the only grocery store I've ever seen that has covered parking.

I rolled down the windows, opened the doors and tried to text a friend to see if she could come help. After only a couple of minutes, the guy who had parked next to me happened to come out of the store and was nice enough to gave the van a jump start. We made it home and all of my refrigerated things were still nice and chilly, yeah!

Justin took a half day from work and we've enjoyed being home together as a family this afternoon. We're going out on our birthday celebration date on Friday, so I'll write about that later. So far, today's been a pretty great birthday and it's not even mine!!