another year older

I am now nineteen! I had a really good birthday yesterday!
My Sunday School class was, embarrassingly, devoted entirely to ME. Erin and Jillian divided the girls into three groups and instructed them to write all the things they thought of when they thought of me. Those lists were used for charades. Goodness, THOSE were funny. I took pictures of the cards... my two favorites are "quaint" and "looks like she just flew in from New York". Click on the picture to read the notes... they're just too funny.

Following the game, Erin shared about her first time meeting me, how I've grown since then and talked a lot about how much I've impacted her and the people I'm around. I don't know if it's true, but all of it was so nice and I might have teared up a little bit (stinkin' Erin and Jillian!). After that, Rebecca and Angel and I stood on chairs (all of us have birthdays this week) for the birthday song. I was glad to not be alone, because standing on a chair in front of a lot of people is a bit odd.

After the song was over, I blew ten candles ("We did one and nine because we didn't have nineteen, see?") on some brightly colored (pink, blue and yellow) cupcakes. Then we all partook of lots of sugar and took a few pictures :)

After class was over, I went into the main building and received so many "Happy Birthday" wishes that any time anyone said anything to me the rest of the day, all I could say was, "Thank you" and hug them (perhaps that's a bit of an exaggeration).

My dad's parents came over for lunch (stuffed shells, mmm!) after church. Opened gifts and had cake (Red Velvet). Becca took over 100 pictures so now I get to see all sorts of candid expressions of myself. Woohoo.

For those interested, I unwrapped a lamp (I'd really been meaning to buy one for my room), an iPod speaker/alarm clock/iPod charger... from Mom and Dad; note cards from Becca; a backpack from Scott (my faithful Nike backpack is gettin' old); a tea kettle from Nana (I really wanted one... I hope it whistles :P); a shirt, the game, Cranium, play dough (in case the play dough in Cranium runs out, I hear), an Old Navy giftcard, and blue Peeps from Grandmamma and Granddaddy. I opened the play dough first and was very confused by it!

Many wall posts on Facebook, birthday cards, text messages and voicemails (left while I took a lovely three and a half hour nap in the afternoon) proved that there were quite a few people who remembered my birthday. Thanks so much!