I have a long-standing tradition of celebrating birthdays with my college roommates, Neha and Kristen.   We always start the evening with homemade cake, which is usually sort of wonky looking.  We never intend for them to look bad.  It’s just that something always  goes awry so we end up with ugly cakes that taste downright yummy.  Before we devour the cake, we take a goofy picture using a timer and tripod.  Neha makes sure to find a prop for said goofy picture and there are plenty of outtakes.  We’ve got scads of pictures with someone half in them or a weird facial expression.  We then head out to the birthday person’s eatery of choice.  Over the years we’ve gone everywhere from mundane places like TGI Friday’s to chic wine bars.  I think, with age, we have gotten more sophisticated in our picks.

One year, Neha and Kristen attempted to make a rainbow cake for my birthday. It apparently got stuck in the pan, left a hole in the center, and the colors ran together. They attempted to “fix” it by filling the hole with frosting and adding red sprinkles to the top. This one “takes the cake” for ugly cakes, but is a good memory.

Here is one of our goofy pictures in our old place.  The extra guy is Faisal who lived downstairs from us.

We went to the Glass Cactus, which is a local “hot spot” one year.

No surprise, this year was a bit different with the additions of the newest Shawvers.  It’s not as if getting a sitter for four infants is an easy task.  Plus, we are currently on modified lock down to protect the babies from cold/flu/RSV season as much as possible.   This means we pretty much take them out only to visit the doctor.  Really, who am I kidding???  Even if we weren’t on lock down I don’t think we’d get four babies out in public it’s too much work.  We also restrict visitors to well people with current flu and Tdap vaccines, ask visitors to remove shoes and wash hands thoroughly before handling babies.

When Kristen’s birthday rolled around this month, I invited my roomies over for some take out Chinese food and baby fun.  Being the awesome friends that they are, Kristen and Neha accepted this change of plans and jumped right into our normal evening routine.  Once they arrived, both scrubbed up and started falling right into place with us.  In the span of one evening, the four of us changed babies, fed babies, burped babies, played with babies, put babies to bed, bathed babies, changed babies, fed babies, put babies to bed, made bottles, fed babies, burped babies, and tucked babies in for the night.   Whew!  Oh yeah, in between baby care we managed to enjoy a nice dinner with a glass of wine.  At the end of the evening, Neha looked at me wide-eyed and said, “You guys do this every night?”  Yes, we do.  We do all of these things all day long every day, but honestly we are accustomed to it because it is our normal and our routine.  I must say, it is so much more fun with a few good friends along for the ride!  I hope we didn’t scare them off….my birthday is coming up after the new year.  Maybe they will come back???

This was Neha’s first time feeding a baby. She did a great job with Sydney even though Sydney can be a bit tricky at times with her leaking and gagging antics.

It’s fun when we have visitors and everyone gets a baby!

This assembly line thing works well with a four member team!

We created an assembly line. Here George is filling bottles and Neha is capping them.

This is what it looks like when there are babies and baby feeders everywhere!

These two were pretty good at feeding by the third feed of the night.

Kristen’s birthday dinner 2012. We took a goofy picture, but I can’t seem to find it. Oh bother…

Here is this year’s wonky cake. Notice where I ran out of frosting for the sides and the top is a bit uneven? I did manage a checkerboard center though.

Cheers to good friends AND sleeping babies!

hugs!

Amber