Birthday Week!

Ben's an 8-2-82, I'm an 8-8-83. That means the first week of August is Birthday Week in our house!

I love nearly sharing a birthday with my husband, but it was a change coming from a family where everybody's birthdays are spaced throughout the year. Ashley is in January, Mom's in March, I'm in August, Dad is in November. Since we've been married, Ben and I always have a big co-birthday celebration because we know we'll have to wait a whole year before we get to celebrate again! It was actually one of the reasons we decided to get married in March instead of waiting til summer, so we would have something else to celebrate the other 359 days of the year.

I thought it would be fun to take a look back on our birthday celebrations from the past couple years...

2006 we celebrated even more things at once with a combination birthday-birthday-housewarming party. The house was as clean like it will never be clean again, since we'd just moved in about a month before. Ben got to fire up his brand new grill. There were hotdogs and brats and it was as hot as August in Nashville can be.

2007 was the year of the FIESTA! We had a rockin' good party featuring the first appearance of the Wii. There was a donkey pinata named Paco. I made fajitas to feed 50. BYOB. Good times all around.

2008 we spent birthday week in Estes Park Colorado, and I had the most magical of all birth-dates ever in the history of birthdays... 08-08-08! It was so fun we just kept chanting it! The discovery of the brookie. White water kayaking. I met Bethany Dillon. Friends and family and all the good stuff.

WILL 2009 top them all? Well, let's just put it this way. There's going to be this:


And lots of it. So bring on the festivities, it's birthday week 2009!

Two Scoops of Yum

Deep in America's heartland, there lies a magical place, from which comes forth the most wonderful concoction known to mankind. Keep your Pinkberry and your Coldstone; give me Braum's.

Braum's is a icecream and dairy company based out of Oklahoma, and is the only remaining major icecream company in the United States that owns the entire operation, from the dairy cows and the farms they live on to the manufacturing plants, to the retail stores where the icecream is sold. And I might be biased, seeing as how for the first half of my life Braum's produced all the milk I drank and the icecream I ate, but I will swear up and down that it is the best in the world. I'm quite the icecream connoisseur, so I should know.

To maintain their quality, Braum's only ships its products a certain distance away from the main headquarters in Oklahoma. This distance, sadly, does not encompass St. Louis, and certainly not Nashville. So when I come back within range - as I am now, at my grandparents' house in Wellington, Kansas - I have to take advantage of it!

Today we drove over to the local Braum's where I perused the different flavors behind the clear counter. I have some funny memories of the combinations my sister and I used to try. I mostly stuck to things in the vanilla/chocolate family, but Ashley... well, her bravery for pairing flavors is legendary. One scoop of orange sherbet and one scoop of peppermint? Yeah, she ate that.

The flavor perusing, for me, is really just a formality. When I only get the chance to eat this icecream maybe once a year, I go for the gold. The champion. My number one icecream of all time. Braum's Cookies & Cream. I can't even talk about it, because words fail to do it justice.

So the next time you're in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, or the western parts of Missouri and Arkansas, check to see if there's a Braum's nearby. You won't be disappointed.

Any other midwestern kids out there reading this who know and love Braums? Please share your favorite flavors in the comments!