It's my birthday and I'll blog if I want to

Yesterday was my birthday, and it was amazing. I had breakfast with my parents and roomies, talked on the phone for a good portion of the day with various friends and family members, cleaned the apartment, had a girly dinner, and then went on an epic bar crawl. Amanda will probably be posting pics on facebook soon, so be on the lookout. Thank you all for your phone calls, texts, and facebook messages! It was such a good day!

My parents are seriously awesome - they are furthering my "dad school" education.* They gave me a set of knives, a power drill and drill bits, and a video camera. Each gift that I opened, my mom prefaced with "it's probably not what you're expecting..." and boy was she right -- random! But everything is awesome! I do actually need a drill. And I do need good knives (especially the chef's knife!). And the camera, well, let's just say that it will be put to good use. (Read: a new FHE activity just might be making music videos...haha). Oh! and speaking of FHE - my roomies gave me a mandoline, which means our dinners are going to be taken to the next level! I want to try to tackle ratatouille sometime soon, and the mandoline will be perfect for that.

The bar hopping was really fun, too. I had a somewhat random group that came out, but everyone had a really good time with each other. Plus, my cousin Emily came for a while, and that was really cool. I was talking with her about how I think my parents have gotten really conservative over the years, and she told me "Erin, they've always been conservative...you just moved out and became way more liberal. Which is a good thing!" Haha...I didn't ever think of it that way. Getting older is nice, because you're at the same point in your life with more people. For instance, Emily is eight years older than I am, so when she was in high school, I was just a baby grammar school kid. More recently, we've been able to get a lot closer because our lives are much more similar. That's really cool.

These birthday bar crawls always end with musical beds, and usually with one too many people squeezed in. But I suppose that when there's that much love to go around, who's to blame? And unlike Amanda on her birthday, I actually got to sleep in my own bed -- victory! Dorcas was a true hero and came over early today to make us breakfast, even though we were definitely still in bed when she got here. It was such a fun night. Definitley a birthday to rival all other birthday celebrations that I've had.

*"Dad school" is a term that Tracie and I came up with when we thought about our dads and how they know how to do EVERYTHING. They can build decks, they can fix toilets, they can install irrigation systems, they are pretty much super heroes. And we figure that they had to learn how to do all of that stuff somewhere...like dad school! So we've made it our mission to go to dad school and graduate with honors.