Joyous Day!

What fun it is having a birthday!
Today was a glorious day beginning with my husband singing "Happy Birthday" in my ear in his morning voice. :) Then, the best gift Tessa could ever give me at her age...waking up at 9:00 a.m. Aaaah, a morning just chilling and enjoying my HOT oatmeal and getting to watch the news and basically just do nothing. :)
Tessa woke up singing and in a great mood, so we played and then walked downtown to meet up with Tessa's friends Malachi and Abram (and MY good friend, Rachel). We met Mark for a quick lunch and then headed to Autumn's house for a wonderful afternoon of kid-free conversation (everyone was taking naps!) Aaaah...how I miss those kind of conversations. :) We headed back home, played with the three of us and then came our "babysitter", Grandma Fieldhouse! Mark totally had something planned for the evening, a surprise nonetheless. He took me to one of my favorite restaurants, Le Craperie (we got a free dessert b/c of my birthday), and then to top of the surprise...Mark pulls out our tennis rackets and we hit the ball around for a good 20 minutes until the lights turned out. It felt so good to hit the ball again...I want to say that it had been about a year since I last played...WAY TOO LONG! Hopefully we'll be able to do more of that. :)
AND, to top it all off, the entire day was sprinkled by wonderful phone calls with songs sung or just a simple birthday greeting, not to mention emails and ecards. Needless to say, I feel loved. :) So, thank you to all of you who made my day the best it could possibly be. God has blessed me with so many beautiful people in my life that I am so thankful for! I look forward to what God has in store for me this coming year...it's amazing how He just continues to mold and shape us year after year constantly keeping us in the palm of His hand.