birthdays, beer, and barbecues

My husband has been booze free for the last few months (he could tell you the weeks, but I haven't been paying attention that closely). When we started talking more seriously about having bebes he decided that he wanted to stop drinking right away, instead of waiting until a little one was on the way.  And, of course, since then, he's lost quite a bit of weight.  Hence this beach strut he was showing off yesterday.

 

This weekend was Brad's birthday.  Since he is not drinking beer (which is one of his favorite things), I decided to make him a variety of foods that have beer in them (the alcohol bakes out).  I  made him a loaf of beer bread, which he requested.  And I also found a recipe for  Blue Moon cupcakes on the blog Spoon Fork Bacon. The cupcakes turned out sooo good. I kind of surprised myself.

 I even took the time to scoop the frosting I made into a ziploc bag so I could pipe it onto the cupcakes to make them look all fancy.

We had a little cookout party to celebrate Brad's getting older, and I was slightly surprised by the number of friends that came.  It was a lot of fun, and we had the perfect weather for it!

 Having get-togethers at our house makes me love our little yard so much. We only really have a yard on one side of the house, and though it's a decent size, there's not really a place for party hosting.  No one minded sitting in the grass, or on the porch, though so it worked out just fine. Someday I'd love to put in a patio, but at this point, I'm just not sure where that would go.

Both days this weekend we got temperatures of over 70-degrees, which doesn't happen often in this part of the country, so of course we had to spend as much time as we could out-of-doors. 

Yesterday, Brad made me ride bikes to church.  I say 'made me' like it was a bad thing.  Our church is not quite 2 miles from our house, and just barely a 10-minute ride.  It was actually kind of enjoyable. ...besides the dumb guy in the van that tried to run me over. People in this town have no idea about bike/traffic laws.

In the afternoon we went down to a local beach park and sat in the sun for an hour or so.  The weather was lovely, and everyone and their grandmother was down at the park.  It was a little noisy with all the shrieking children, but it's probably good not to avoid those situations since we would like to have children in the near future.  Might as well get used to all the noise now.

 I love our little part of the world.  When the weather is nice, it's so beautiful here!