Birthday 2011

This year I wanted a little family trip for my birthday, so last weekend found us heading up to Sacramento--hooray!. I love it there, and it has many kid attractions we hadn't experienced yet. First up, the mini amusement park Funderland:

We graced the Discovery Museum Science and Space Center with our presence on Saturday:

then made a quick trip to the Sacramento temple in the rain:

Sunday was my actual birthday. Thanks to Vacation Rules, I was able to ignore Fast Sunday and pig out at The Cheesecake Factory for lunch. Speaking of being a pig, did you know California has a new law that requires restaurants with 20+ locations to list calorie information on their menus? It was helpful but depressing. 1950 calories for my favorite Stuffed Chicken Tortillas entree!?! It can't help that I followed that up with the Outrageous Chocolate Cake at 1510!

It was the little things that made this a great trip: a change of scenery, eating at family-friendly chain and fast-food restaurants (including my first stand-alone Chick-Fil-A), watching good cable, going in the hot tub. The Brothers loved playing on the hotel room beds, and 1st Brother asked if he could sleep in the suitcase:

My husband did his hacker magic and put my SIM card into his old iPhone (resurrected from water damage after sitting around for a few months), so now I'm an iPhone person! I was kind of proud of my outdated flip phone, but texting without a keyboard was the worst, so now I'm much happier.

Among other great gifts, I also got the complete Pee-Wee's Playhouse series on DVD. Yes! Now I feel I have all the tools I need to raise my children right.

As a grand finale to all the celebrations, I got to spend Wednesday evening with friends and the "ladies" of AsiaSF. It was a good time with some intriguing performances; wow!