May 31 Birthday Lunch with Dylan

Wednesday: Today is NOT Dylan's birthday, but since his actual birthday was Sunday and he already had a full day planned (all Sunday's are busy days at Dylan's house), and since Miss Jen is away on her honeymoon and I've had a slightly more demanding schedule with the kiddos, we decided Wednesday would be a good day to have his birthday lunch.

I never know much about downtown restaurants, but Dylan does and he chose Sanchez--just a short walk from where he works. I neglected to take a single picture of the place; but it is a pretty impressive-looking building and the restaurant itself inside is amazing to look at. Dylan helped me order something since most of what was on the menu was rather ... unknown and untried and completely unheard of (this illustrates how completely inexperienced I am in eating anything other than "American").

Anyway, we had such a nice lunch! It was good to sit and talk and actually be able to concentrate on just our conversation instead of three or four different ones going on at the same time (at Dylan's house). I'm very glad we were able to share this time together.

Since this is Dylan's very LAST year of his 30's, I fashioned his birthday card around an old and favorite song of his dad's: "Forever Young."

Here is the card I made for Dylan:

The inside of the card looked like this:

This picture was on the back of the card:

It took me awhile to find these pictures, mostly because I have SO MANY BINS of pictures. I am glad I found these, though, to use for Dylan's birthday card. Thankful for the visual reminders of days gone by--precious times with this person who was once just a little boy, who was sweet in every way. I see some of Cal in all of these pictures--do you? 

I also enclosed in Dylan's card a scanned picture of he and his dad from when Dylan was about two years old:

I like the way Dylan and Jim are looking at each other with a certain tenderness.

After our lunch, I picked Erin and Cal up from Miss Carrie's house and drove over to Dylan and Kelly's. Cal fell asleep on the way home, so we drove my car into their garage, opened all the car windows, and let Cal nap while Erin and I read some library books together and just hung out 1-on-1 while we waited for Aidan's bus. 

I DO wish I had taken some pictures of what followed when Aidan came home, but I didn't! I had brought a bunch of paper airplane books along and we folded some and flew them all over the house. We had SO MUCH FUN. Dear Aidan was SO into this! He was just bursting with happiness and fun. So thankful for these little ones to love.