Mah Birfday

When December rolls around, we've entered the "birthday section" of the year on both our sides of the family.  Of those family members with whom we celebrate and have parties, we've all got birthdays that are through the winter/spring/early summertime.  My birthday seems to kick everything off, and it's been particularly hard for us to find time to celebrate it over the last few years because we've just been getting busier and busier the closer it gets to Christmas.  But I love me some birthday cake, so I had to make sure we fit it in somewhere!

December was a really hard month for us (more on that later), but the celebration was pretty fun.  I wanted to keep it low-key and we invited our parents only, but since my parents were living it up on a cruise (lucky ducks) that week, my in-laws came up from Indy to help us have a good time.

We went out to dinner at Teppenyaki for some Chinese and then to the Nativity open-house at our church.  It's always such a good event to attend at the beginning of December to get you in the mood for Christmas.  The entire building is decked out in different nativities to celebrate the coming of Christ.  They have different rooms for different types of nativities--handmade, commercial, foreign, white/gold, and black/silver.  We loaned out three of our own nativities for the event, two of which are here:

The three wisemen that my father-in-law Gary made for us a few years ago.  They went into the handcrafted room.

The Guatemala nativity that Gary brought back from his mission trip this fall.  You could find this in the foreign room!

Minnetrista also held its annual Luminary Walk that weekend, and we decided to take Gary and Michele to see the sights!  Minnetrista holds a special place in our hearts because we got our engagement pictures taken there.  Every year they decorate the Ball brothers' mansions for Christmas and open them up to the public.  I love seeing the interesting trees because they change them up every year.  Three of my favorites:

The Music Tree

UPSIDE-DOWN TREE!  How cool is that?!

This tree was decorated by the Dance Department on campus, I think.  It was done in a Broadway Musical theme.

These were set up along the walk between the houses.  We just couldn't resist!

Telling some story or another...

It was pleasant out, but I still thought it was a little cold!

Minnetrista also has a cultural center/museum/gift shop that they open up to the public as well.  They were hosting a dinosaur exhibit!  Since Kyle loves dinosaurs, we decided to see what it was all about.

Probably my favorite picture of the night...Kyle got photo-bombed by this little kid who was trying to figure out what he was doing!  It was too funny!

Making dino prints

The dinosaur Christmas tree!

 They also have an Indiana artist gallery in the center.  I thought this painting was owl-fully cute (see what I did there?!) and I couldn't resist taking a picture of it. 

Finally, after walking off our buffet, we were ready for some ice cream cake.  I got out the biggest knife to cut it and we devoured that thing!
 

It was a good day.  I couldn't ask for much more!