My 41st birthday started out pretty rough. I woke up at 2am because Ben was pushing me off the bed. He almost never wakes in the middle of the night and I have no idea how he got there. All I knew was that there was not enough room for the three of us. I went downstairs and slept on the couch.

Then the twins woke at 5:30am. Not that different than most days but I was so hoping for something a little later for my birthday.

As my birthday landed on a Friday, it pretty much seemed like just another normal day. Which depressed me a bit.

Twins up to their normal tricks, even on my birthday.

I kept checking my facebook page for birthday wishes. A total of 65 people out there in the wide world wished me a happy birthday. Unfortunately everybody I physically spent the day with completely ignored it. Okay, two out of three of them have a vocabulary of about  30 words, but I was still kind of hoping that they would somehow magically stop fighting, crying and pooping for just one day.

When Adam came home I announced I was not, in fact, turning 41 today. I was going to wait and turn 41 tomorrow, and have a birthday weekend.

Mmmm. Strawberry cheesecake, maybe it wasn’t all bad…

And so this weekend I made up for it with a great couple of days filled with stuff I don’t normally do – shop, date night at Prosecco, foot massage, and wonderfully, an afternoon with Stan.

The kids insist on photo bombing Adam and I’s date night photo

Stan and I were buddies from our days in Hong Kong. He now lives in London and happened to be here on a short layover between cities.

I’m not sure he appreciated the visit as much as me. Look how the older boys treated our guest…

After all that abuse we left Adam on his own with all these rug rats and we met up with Matt Moder for a lovely liner? dunch? at Revolucion Steakhouse.

Stan was also grappling with his own birthday thoughts. His was a big one this year. And I know on big birthdays you have a tendency to wonder if you’ve ticked off all the boxes you should have by that age. Stan wished he had ticked off more.

“Wait, didn’t you basically create your own global currency that trades publicly?” I asked.

“Um… TICK!” Matt seconded. “Where is the box for that?”

Lovely, lovely weekend and now I’m ready to be 41 for the next 363 days.