Birthdayweek

I am a big believer in eeking out birthday celebrations to their maximum potential as a single day is just never enough!  And so I like to have not just ‘birthday’ but ‘birthweek’.  This year my birthday fell on a Monday so I had a whole weekend to enjoy celebrations ahead of the big day!  …and quite a few days afterwards as well…

Celebrations began on Friday evening when I met up with two good friends for a meal in Uxbridge – a vaguely midway meeting point.  We had been talking about meeting for some time and the chances of coinciding diaries was looking slim so it was exciting that we managed to get our dates to coincide for my birthday weekend.  Since none of us knew the area we had looked online and gone with the recommendations there.  Finding parking was our first adventure after the road suddenly became pedestrianised with no clear signs of other options.  Then, finding our way out of the parking to the High Street proved to be more of a challenge than expected.  But we managed and got to the restaurant to discover it wasn’t exactly what we had expected.  Slightly more burger joint than restaurant, but…  the food was good and we enjoyed ourselves catching up with each other both there and at a pub afterwards, and it was a great start to my weekend.

Saturday was to be a lunch meal with my family which would also see the Brazilian churrascaria marked off on my celebrations list.  I woke up feeling tired and groggy but I’m never exactly a morning person(!!!) so I just figured that given time I would wake up.  I was wrong!  And by 11.30am I was being sick with a terrible migraine.  Somehow I still managed to get myself into London and to the restaurant, though later than our arranged meet time, but was sadly unable to eat more than a few chips and a bit of chicken.  So as a listed celebration this is a do-over.  A Churrascaria without eating a sizeable quantity of meat just isn’t an acceptable Churrascarian experience!  But as a definite highlight my nephew was delightful and very excited about Aunty Faith’s party.  He had me grinning when he suddenly ran round to me and declared “kiss, kiss, happy birthday Aunty Faith”, and let me kiss the top of his head before he was off again.

It was great to get back to my brother’s flat and be able to relax a bit more on the sofa and work on feeling a little more human.  Nathaniel had agreed to help Aunty Faith open her gifts, and a very good helper he was too.  Though it didn’t stop my jaw seriously hitting the floor when faced with the generosity of my amazing family for my birthday!  Of course for Nathaniel there is only one real ingredient to any serious birthday celebration… cake!  And there he was kind enough to help me too! :)

On Sunday I got to celebrate with my church.  Unfortunately I was still feeling really bad in the morning but after a lunch time visit from my soon to be neighbour Corinna I began to perk up.  And by the time of dinner at the end of Church I was actually able to eat something! Yay!  It was lovely to share my birthday with my friends and special to be sharing my celebration with Lucy who is sadly moving away and us.  By the end of the evening I was feeling that ‘project birthday celebrations’ was definitely back on track.

Monday, my actual birthday, and I finally felt totally well again.  So I celebrated by having a non-forced duvet day.  I finally had the energy to work on setting up my new gifts and enjoying them.  It was a lovely chilled day ahead of going out for dinner with the ‘Chestnut’ girls in the evening.  After more than a year of living in the area we finally got to check out the Chinese restaurant which I have driven / run / walked past sooo many times and wondered what it was like.  Not the chicest joint perhaps but the food was great and I got to wish happy birthday to another girl celebrating there who was lucky enough to have the same great birthday as me!

Back to work on Tuesday and one of my colleagues had been talking about doing something at lunch.  But that morning she was very quiet about the subject and others in the office were behaving EVEN stranger than normal!  I knew something was going on and guessed why so I obediently sat quietly at my desk patiently waiting for all to be revealed...  I was blindfolded, led into my boss’s office and asked to identify the smell… instant answer… CHOCOLATE!!!  No chance I’m not recognising that smell!  And what an amazing sight as the blindfold came off - a chocolate fountain and bowls of strawberries, bananas and giant marshmallows!  That was one delicious lunch, even if I did feel a little bit queasy afterwards.  Definitely a happy queasy!!!  I felt truly spoiled!

I didn’t feel quite ready to be done with birthday and after the Tuesday chocolate fountain I didn’t feel quite ready for birthday cakes for the office that day either.  So the birthday had to run into Wednesday when that became cake day.  So I managed 6 consecutive days of birthday celebrations.  But with a list of 40 things to complete, and only 2 completed so far, my celebrations are most certainly not over yet!!!