The actual day…

Tamryn and I invited all our girl-friends to a fun dinner at a restaurant called Casablanca. Our celebration also happened to coincide with our annual jewel of the bay’s (my belly dance troupe) night out. There is a belly dancer that dances at the Middle Eastern restaurant so we love gathering there!

Birthday Treats

Two big tables of wonderful people, lovely food and Tamryn and I were feeling happy as could be. We had sent the guys to their own beer and wings dinner and planned to meet them later that night.

Belly Dance friends

All together

Our cake was presented to our guests, they loved it but many were confused. I suppose I should backtrack for those of you that have been counting since last year was my golden birthday (on the 25^th). This year would/should have been my 26^th, right? But since Tamryn 24 and I didn’t want 2426 or 2624 on our birthday cake I used my handy math (haha) brain and decided she was gaining a year and I was losing one…so we ‘turned’ 25.

One of our friends ended up with a black iced cupcake and after she took a huge bite, and laughed my fears were confirmed…the colour does show up on your teeth. So she spent the better half of the night trying to get rid of some of the dark stain that was covering her mouth. Oops!

Celebration!!!

After dinner we met up with the guys to attend a comedy show. During the show I agreed to be an audience volunteer. My task was to add sound effects to an improve scene. Apparently I am not very good at this as I began giggling through most of it. When I did try to attempt making sound effects I would think of the word as opposed to the sound. So the door went “creak” literally. After a while I got the hang of it and between giggling I managed to complete the scene.

I love these people!

My wonderful friends

I had a great time that night. It was so great to see all my friends and to have them all interact together.

Tamryn and I

I don’t know how the tradition began that on her birthday I get encouraged to have a guys night before we meet up with the girls, however I am certainly not complaining. I actually think it leads to a very fun evening for all involved and also makes it so that there isn't a huge group at the restaurant. 

And of course I love my boyfriend!

My favourite holiday…aka my birthday!

It’s no secret I love, love, love my birthday. This has little to do with the presents and more to do with the gathering of friends that meet to celebrate. I have one night when all my friends from different areas of my life all come together to meet, mingle and have a great night.

Tamryn (a fellow South African, who is au pairing here in Wisconsin) and I found out we have more in common than just sharing a home country. We live in the same province, our sisters shares the same school and we share a birthday! [cue] double birthday bash planning!

I had seen a picture of a South Africa flag birthday cake and convinced Tamryn that we would be able to pull it off. Well…

Planning the cake

Tamryn came over and we started baking lots and lots of little cupcakes. We even got inventive and made vanilla ones, chocolate ones and swirly mixed ones. After baking enough cupcakes and letting them cool off we had to find a way to create a normal looking rectangle. Considering that some of our cupcakes looked more like the humpback of Notre Dame than little molehills, this was a difficult task.

Working out if we had enough cupcakes

Finally we decided on the layout of the cupcakes, including candle space. We then laid out the icing plan of attack. Half way through icing cupcakes I looked up at Tamryn, she had blue icing on her lips. I was trying to tell her this but I was laughing so hysterically that I was not able to tell her, so she kept asking and I kept laughing. I had images of her with blue at our party (the next day) in my head. Eventually I managed to get it out, she washed it off and the day was saved.

Icing the cupcakes

It took a while but we managed to complete our masterpiece and clean up the kitchen all before 11 pm.

All done :)

New Year’s Eve

This year Tyler and I decided to hang out with friends and have a chilled New Year’s Eve. It turned out to be a great decision. It was a great idea on our part. It was awesome night, filled with food, fun and lots of laughs.

After playing “cards against humanity” which is basically a grown up version of apples to apples, we moved to battle of the sexes which the girls lost. Horribly!

5…4…3…2…1…Happy New Year…and not long after that we were all ready to bed. Haha. Guess this is called getting old.

Happy New Year

It was neat to stay in on a new years and hang out with close friends. Given that we are getting old and loud noisy bars with tons of people more tend to annoy us than anything else it was neat to just relax and hang out. I think going forward we may try to do this more often! That said, it certainly is not as good as being on the beach in South Africa!

Bromance...