Queen for a day...or weekend.

OK, so I'm 33...and so far it's the bomb diggity. It's true that it's only been 24 hours, and not everything has been perfect (duh) but with each year that I gain an age number (since I turned 30) I find that I celebrate cautiously, waiting for the inevitable terrifying realization of oldness to set in. So...24 hours into age 33...no terror. And that's my report.

I believe in my last post I mentioned the concept of Queen Jenny Day as a new representation of my birthday, which began jokingly because I love my birthday so much and sort of took flight once Big and Little caught wind and jumped on. Well, I'm proud to say that this year's inaugural Queen Jenny Day celebration has not only been the best thing everrrrrrr, but it's morphed into a weekend of celebration as well! On Friday night, after many an hour of anxious toe tapping on my part, Hubby arrived home from work with the most beautiful dozen roses ever! and declared that Queen Jenny Weekend was beginning. God, I love that man.

So Friday night we had pizza and movie night with the girls, and I pretty much got to sit on my big fat duff while he hummingbirded around getting drinks and serving pizza with truly amazing speed and dexterity. Awesome.

Saturday morning brought out the true hero in Hubby as Saturday was the actual Queen Jenny Day. As usual, the girls awakened far too early and headed in to climb into bed with us for snuggle time, it's our daily routine. Hubby awakened and declared that snuggle time would be cut to 5 minutes for the day. Snuggling commenced. They evacuated. I passed out. I was awakened a few hours later by Hubby with a taptaptap "Hurry up and look in the kitchen!" that oozed such excitement that I was just the tiniest bit worried that I might find the curtains on fire (except that we don't have curtains, but I was still half asleep so logic escaped me). But I didn't find fire. Instead, I found 2 very excited girls, who serenaded me with Happy Birthday before I even made it through the doorway, and breakfast! Awwww. So we ate together, while Hubby did his hummingbird impression again. Big made sure that I tried some of the orange juice that Little had concocted and she had stirred (so they totally made it) and for those few minutes I reveled in the moment, because all general crappiness had ceased and life was perfect.

Post-breakfast time quickly became cards (which were homemade from the girls and OMG, practically brought me to tears they were so freaking awesome!) and present time, and then get-ready-for-the-beach-time, which I did help with lest you think I'm a birthday sloth. Little butts were wiped and swimsuit straps hoisted over oddly folded arms, sunscreen applied...and around 10 (an hour later than we had hoped) we headed out for our hour drive to the beach. At first we had a little mumbling discontent about the length of the drive from the back seat, but one wave of my magic hand over the DVD player in the van improved the situation greatly. Man, I love that thing.

Shortly after Rapunzel and Eugene escaped the tower, we arrived at our sandy destination. Excitement was abundant...and then waned as we made it to the sand and got our first look around. See, the unfortunate thing about the beach in Wisconsin is that it's lake beach, which in most cases is great because of the lack of annoying and nasty salt in the water, except in our case yesterday it just meant that there were 8 million tiny dead fish floating in the water and washed up on the beach. *barf* It looked to me like a mass poisoning scene in CSI:aquatics...hundreds of little silver fish, laying there in the sand just kind of just staring at us motionless..whispering "run, ruuuuuuun!!!" in their ghostly fish voices. We females of the family were...umm...skeeved. To say the least. But once Hubby convinced me that we weren't all going to catch some rare form of deadly fish disease (which honestly took more than a few minutes) we did eventually plant ourselves in a fishless spot and commenced Operation Introduce Offspring to the Beach. Overall, a great experience. Sand castles were erected poorly, small waves were jumped, shells collected (I totally didn't know that lakes had shells either! I know! Weird!). Hubby even made a sand sculpture of sorts to impress us women folk, and 4 hours later we were all beached out and headed home...making sure to bring a little bit of the beach home with us in the girls cracks for posterity. What's trip to the beach without some crack sand!? All in all, I'd say we effectively checked the block. Awesome.

Home arrival brought shower time, a few over-tired tears (no, not from me surprisingly) and a quick accidental nap from Hubby and I. (The girls are fine, I swear.) At some point Hubby and I discovered that we both had done a rather reckless job of applying our sunscreen and would be paying the price for a few days. (So...that aerosol spray sunscreen? Yeah, make sure you do rub it in...even if the bottle says you don't have to. Otherwise it may just blow off in the wind, make random contact with your body parts, and leave you with a swirly, checker board type, hot, painful sun burn. Just sayin'.) But even that didn't stop us from getting gussied up and hitting the town, or, er...my favorite restaurant for a night out.

Grandma arrived. We left the house at 7:30, and arrived home at 9. OMG, we're so ooooooold! But we had great time being out alone...and not putting the girls to bed for one night (thanks Grams!). I consumed birthday cookie dough ice cream to conclude the day's celebration of Queen Jenny Day, declared to Hubby that I was wayyyyy too full of birthday, and promptly passed out on the couch next to him around 10. Pure awesome.

So it's Sunday now. I was awakened by the sounds of screams and cries from Little that Grandma had gone home and it was now just us, you know her parents, who were inhabiting the house. Oh the humanity, I know. Big crawled in bed with me, and Hubby was nowhere to be found. (I did find him later laying sleeplessly on the couch. Nightmare...poor guy.)

Little did eventually crawl into bed with Big and I, but her unsoothable screaming sobs, chased us out all too early. So here I sit. Big has gone off with her Dad for breakfast, Hubby is presently sitting on the couch reading the newspaper, and Little has ceased crying for the time being, mostly because I promised that I would drop her off at Grandma's in a few minutes so Hubby and I can go to church in peace. (Sorry God, but that kid isn't stepping anywhere near your home today. You'll totally thank me later.) It's now time for me to step away from this computer and get my prayer-on for the day.

Today will bring the closing ceremonies of Queen Jenny weekend, which shall include dinner and cake at Grandma's house, followed closely by a parade with lots of throwing candy that was enthusiastically dreamed up by the girls. Lots of laughs will ensue, I'm sure...and a good time will be had by all. I'm pretty sure that when all is said and done, the inaugural Queen Jenny Weekend will go down in history as the best weekend everrrrrrrr, only to be topped by the possibilities of next year's festivities. Hubby set the bar high...I can only hope he knows the corner he's painted himself into for the years to come. God, I love that man.