My birthday!

Hey everyone,

Today is that special occasion that comes once a year... my birthday!  (Ok, if you answered 'Beth's birthday', you still get a point for being correct.  Damn birthday-stealing little sisters :P ).

It's been fun - starting last night when Jeff cooked me homemade hamburgers  (because he didn't want the hassle of cooking my birthday dinner in my little apartment tonight) and we had freshly baked carrot cake for dessert, with lemon cream cheese icing.  It was Jeff's first attempt at carrot cake and it was really awesome! He was a little short on carrot, so he added raisins, and they were a great chewy little addition!

This morning I had my English Club students coming in, so I decided to hold a traditional Kiwi birthday party - the type you had when you were six years old.  We started with a scavenger hunt ('a magazine' took them a while - I rejected one book and two comics before they got the right idea!), then had an egg and spoon race (that seemed to be their favourite game!), blew up balloons and had morning tea, followed by Musical Chairs (two kids gave themselves carpet burn and were going on about how much it hurt.  I was sorely tempted to teach them the popular English phrase 'harden up'), did Statues and finished with Pass the Parcel (prizes were sparkly hair ties, One Piece x Hello Kitty stickers and Anpanman tissues)..

At the end I told them the last thing you need at a birthday party is birthday cake, so I pulled out the second half of Jeff's carrot cake (I had done some soul searching the night before, about whether it was better to keep all the cake for myself and therefore have more cake, or share the cake and have more opportunity to brag about my husband's cooking.  It was a hard call, but I decided I didn't need the calories from an ENTIRE carrot cake, so it tipped the scales in favour of sharing).  I gave them each a slice while I gave my little fifteen year olds important life advice, "When you get married, make sure you marry a man who can cook."  How many of them understood I'm not sure, but they were nodding with big eyes.  That may be because of the cake I was wielding though.  However, I happen to know that there ARE Japanese men that can cook, they are just few and far between, so if my English Club kids heed my words of wisdom, hopefully at least a couple of them will get guys that help out around the home.  Leaving my students more time to pursue their careers as translators and airport staff!  (I know that some guys can cook because when I worked teaching guys at a shipping company I used to tease them about 'cooking' instant noodles, so they would get all indignant and tell me the things they could cook.  One guy cooked his girlfriend a three course dinner, including dessert!  No surprises he's taken!)

Anyway, they were really impressed with Jeff's cake and were HUGE fans of the lemon cream cheese icing. Such big fans, in fact, that when the cake was all gone they used the icing on cookies (understandable) and spicy chips (chips as in crisps, not as in fries.  Times NZ English fails me...).  Apparently it was good on chips.  I took their word for it.  Finally they managed to convince one super shy girl that because it looked so like mayonnaise, she should try it with one of the boiled eggs from the egg and spoon race!  She kept complaining it was sweet while the other girls kept repeating 'mayonnaise, mayonnaise!'.  I was going 'yeah, it's sweet!  There is lots of sugar in that!'  As I don't like mayo, I was very offended that they considered that delicious icing to be approximate to it.  But it's probably good they did what they did, because they got boiled egg in the last of the icing, which stopped me just finishing it up straight out of the bowl...

Tonight Jeff and I are going to a great little cafe in Fukuyama for dinner.  Jeff hasn't been there before, but I often have my Wide Island View meetings there.  The couple that run it spent some time living in Townsville, Australia, so they have great English and their cafe is rather international feeling.  They have a pie on the menu, but it's served with rice (??), so we'll go check it out tonight.  I'm telling Jeff not to hold his breath...

Ok, time to pack up and get ready to leave.  Hope your day is as fun as mine!
xo