Married at work: Happy Birthday Ryan!

Our nephew, Ryan, was born the day before my birthday :) So needless to say we've been celebrating our "green" birthdays together. Well you know how that goes...he's 4 and I'm 27 so we're celebrating his birthday and I get a few presents. It's fun though because normally at this age you don't get a celebration at all.

I wonder if in the future they'll play off of St. Patty's day and make it a day to go "green"... you know, environmentally. I guess I haven't even checked...some places may have already done this as a way of advertising green products.

For Ryan's birthday we went to "Pump it Up" in the cities where they rented out the entire place. It's basically a large room with about 4 different HUGE blow-up things you can jump in. Adults can go too :) It was so much fun and I didn't get shocked once!! It's a great workout too. Then after all the kids jump and jump and jump, we all go into the party room to eat cake and Ryan opens his presents....chaos! It was a lot of fun. Then my family all went over to Maple Grove to a new hotel and stayed the night there....let the party continue :) Darren and Laura treated us to our hotel room and it was really nice and new. They had a whirlpool outside! We had 4 different rooms and Abby loved going in and out of all the different rooms. Ryan opened some more presents and I opened some too. His favorite present by far? Little hockey guys with a little rink...he literally played with them by himself for HOURS!

It's so funny what we get excited for as adults. I loved my gifts. I got a heart rate monitor (to help with my training for the tri), little tupperware containers for lunches (with built-in coolers) and a personal blender. Oh and of course green shamrock socks.

Another bonus to the night was I FINALLY got to go to Trader Joe's!!! This is a grocery store that offers lots of natural and good-for-you foods at prices that aren't outrageous (a dream come true for me). I've heard so much about this place through Weight Watchers and there isn't one near here. So when I found out there was a Trader Joe's right across the street from our hotel I nearly wet myself! Darren, my mom, Scott and I walked over to check it out. It was everything I imagined it to be and more. Loved it! And Scott did too. Now if only we could get one in Rochester!

Scott is now preparing a 6 course homemade meal for my birthday and I'm supposed to know nothing about it. He started this tradition last year and I have to say the food was amazing. I'm getting hungry smelling it.

Btw, I'm not going to do this birthday thing anymore once I come around to my year anniversary of blogging...it's just too much work and it's hard to decide who to do and who not to do. Unless we do something like we did for Ryan's this year, I won't be writing about them after June so don't be offended if you don't see it :)

Here are some pictures (taken with my crappy camera...we took more with the better camera just haven't edited them yet). Also some videos:

The birthday boy with his hockey guys