March Birthday Buddies

Even though Janae was born only a few days before Jason's 34th birthday, over the years they haven't often celebrated together.

This year, however, they took advantage of the opportunity to go out for lunch together on a Saturday halfway in between the two dates. They chose an Indian restaurant--since they both love Indian food. Maybe this will be a new tradition :)

Of course, they also celebrated their own special days as well.

Last March Janae celebrated her 13th birthday just days before the Covid-19 pandemic started affecting our lives. This year, we are seeing things slowly getting back to normal, although there still seems to be a long way to go.

We were planning to celebrate Janae's 14th birthday at home with just our family (as per our local regulations), but Janae and her friends had other ideas! Over lunch at school, they started talking about going to an escape room. They did their research and found there was one in town still open that had all the required health precautions in place. It also had an adventure that sounded fun and that none of them had tried before.

The girls even made a Google Slides presentation for their parents to convince them that it would be safe and okay, not to mention necessary for Janae's happiness on her birthday. They are all in a single cohort at school, eating lunch together, etc. without masks, so this seemed to be an extension of that, in a controlled environment, and I agreed to the plan pretty quickly.

In the end, everyone else agreed to it as well, and the group met to try their luck at "fighting underground crime." Apparently they were successful!

Later, we celebrated at home with Janae's request: a DQ cake with the face of her favorite actor on the top. (We used Janae's original sketch of him as Enjolras in Les Misérables.)

Janae wasn't too impressed with how her sketch looked on the cake, but she enjoyed eating it anyway.

Janae had been asking for a bigger bed for a LONG time, and she finally convinced Jason that a queen-sized mattress would fit in her room ... so now she's finding it even harder to get up in the morning, but she's happy to have the extra sleeping space.

Jason's birthday request was a little simpler; he said the only thing he wanted was to go on a family bike ride.

This past Christmas Jason surprised all of us with bikes, and it has been his dream to go out on a trail together. He used to ride all over Montreal with his dad and grandpa when he was young, so this is something he has missed a lot. Now that we all have bikes and the weather is getting nicer, we should have many more opportunities for riding.

Anyway, we were happy to have a sunny day on Saturday so we could make Jason's birthday wish come true.

We spent the rest of the day working on our scruffy new yard.

Yesterday was Jason’s actual birthday, so we made him a tall chocolate cake

and lit 48 candles, which generated enough heat to melt the chocolate on top! Jason blew them all out easily, though :)

We played Yahtzee afterwards, which turned out to be a bit more crazy than we’d expected, with Eric and Janae's antics.

So, as Alaina said, our March birthdays "started with a lion (Janae) and ended with a Lamb (Jason), and we wouldn't have it any other way" :)  It's been a great month to celebrate these two and all that they add to our lives ... and we got to eat lots of cake!