Birthday week! {part 1}

Thomas and I have the same birthday. Yeah, I know, it's weird. And it gets weirder. Not only were we both born on November 9th, but we were born the same year, so we are exactly the same age. If you're being precise, Thomas is two hours older than me. It took quite a bit of work figure that one out, since we were born in two different timezones - me in England and him in Illinois.

When we first met in 7th grade at boarding school, I thought it was terribly embarrassing to have the same birthday as a BOY. Especially because of a certain tradition they had at school - on your birthday your name was called out in assembly/chapel and you had to walk up in front of the whole school to get a special "you-get-to-cut-to-the-front-of-the-lunch-line-in-the-cafeteria-because-it's-your-birthday" slip of paper. It was kind of mortifying. AND I had to walk up there with a BOY.

Obviously, I got over it and married him. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about never having a birthday all to myself... but so far it hasn't been too bad. It's kind of fun to wake up and say happy birthday to each other. And to have two birthday cakes. And double the presents.

This year is kind of our first "real life" birthday. Thomas has a job so he's gone all day, and it just so happens that he has a class on Tuesday nights, so today he will be gone until around 9pm. To make up for the fact that we will be apart all day, I declared it to be "birthday week". We are spreading out our celebrations to make it more fun.

We got to "open" our presents on Sunday, and yesterday I made our at-home birthday dinner.

Anyone wanna guess what it was from the table setting in this picture?

No? Well I'll tell you then. We had chinese dumplings!

And they are a heck of a lot of work for just two people. But we had fun making them together.

Wrapping the meat mixture up in the wonton wrappers

This is what they look like when they're cooked

We used chopsticks to pick them up, dunk them in the dipping sauce, and stick them in our mouths. We felt very accomplished.

Speaking of that dipping sauce, it might just be one of my favorite things in the world.

Soy sauce + sesame oil + vinegar + chopped up garlic cloves, ginger root, and jalapeno peppers = amazing explosion of tastiness.

All ready to eat

I figured I'd better have at least one picture with one of us in it, so I snapped one of Thomas while he was skillfully dunking his dumpling.

Today Thomas's work is taking both of us out for a birthday lunch. There are only 4 people in the engineering consulting firm he works for, so it's more family-like. And tonight we have our ice-cream cakes!

Stay tuned, more birthday week to come!