On March 11 I celebrated my 35th birthday!  Typically we love to have all of our friends over and celebrate birthdays with a big party.  Since we know so few people her and I don’t think our neighbors in the apartment would appreciate a Simpson style dance party we spent the day a bit differently.  We were super blessed by some friends of ours who invited us into their home for a homemade pizza party on Friday.  Our first time being invited over to someone’s home.  We felt so loved, but also missed our Minnesota friends.

It was great that we had good weather and that my birthday landed on a Saturday this year.  No one enjoys having their birthday on a weekday, it’s just such a bummer.  We started the day out with some coffee and heading to the gym to do our Crossfit open workout 17.3 .  It’s a fun and exciting time at the gym for everyone.  The Open is a set of 5 weekly workouts happening on consecutive weeks in which athletes from all over the world compete to get the best scores at their local gyms.  Workouts are judged and scores are posted on crossfit.com leaderboard.  Top qualifiers from the area will go to a regional competition, the top qualifiers will go to the Crossfit Games (which you may have seen on TV) You can read more about the crossfit games workouts here  It was great to do something I love (crossfit) with someone I love (Caleb) and have the kids join in the excitement by attending the event!  Caleb is doing all the workouts RX, as prescribed,  I am doing a scaled version of the workout, which basically means it’s lower weights.  I’m hoping to be strong and healthy enough next year to do RX!  On a side note I sprained my thumb while we were skiing in February.  I was a little bit concerned that it would not allow me to compete in the open at all. But luckily Caleb was able to tape me up and working out hasn’t seemed to make it any worse as long as I am careful.

Overall the workout went pretty well for me.  I am still not super confident doing squat snatches at increasing weight for more than a couple in a row. So doing scaled version allowed me to do power snatch followed by the overhead squat, which worked well for me.    Caleb felt a bit off during the workout on Saturday and ended up repeating the workout on Monday and was able to get at least 10 more reps the second time.   He felt better about his second score. Way to go Caleb!

Here are some of our pictures from the workout: I love this first one!  (move mouse onto picture and click on right/ left arrows to see the album)

After we got home I got to open my presents.  Caleb did such a good job shopping for special Japanese gifts.  I got a beautiful yukata (japanese robe) a musical jewelry box, and a  tea set that matches our sake set. I love everything!  So many pretty things that I will treasure forever!

So nice to get a good workout done in the morning so we could celebrate and EAT later. We went to an amazing steak lunch as a family.   The food was delicious and I was soooooo full but managed to eat (and share) my fun birthday dessert!  YUM! YUM YUM!

Caleb also surprised me by telling me he wanted to take me to a home improvement store to by some big house plants.  It’s funny the thing we miss. I never thought I would be so excited to go to a home improvement store on my birthday.  We were so impressed with the selection of things at this store it is totally like a Menards, Loews, or Home Depot in the US!  We drove the the store and parked in the parking garage.  It was awesome to walk around and look at the plants.  We used google translate and other websites to make sure we were getting good plants for our apartment.  We ended up getting 5 large plants and proceeded to try to fit them into our Prius.  I was doubtful, but of course the engineer was determined AND made them fit in the car.  If it wasn’t funny enough driving in the jungle car when we got home we loaded them all into our small elevator in our apartment.  As we were on our way up the elevator stopped to let some other people on.  To our neighbor’s surprise there we were peeking out from plants. I still laugh thinking about this.   We all decided it may be best if they waited for us to go up and unload the plants before they rode the elevator up.  Definitely a memorable and fun birthday! I even got 2 packages sent in the mail filled with goodies.  Thanks Mom and Dad for the fun quilting stuff! Thanks Amy for the US snacks and treats!!! I feel so loved!

On Sunday we went o a park and played badminton!  Pretty silly little game, but we had fun!

Here are some pictures from the rest of our weekend!

(move mouse onto picture and click on right/ left arrows to see the album)