This post is full of photos of the weekend without telling any major story. My birthday was on Saturday and I turned a whopping thirty-four years old. Several weeks back I told Simon that I wanted to spend my birthday at the lake, and he was on board with it. Except that sounds so darn easy, doesn’t it? Oh yes, let’s leisurely hop down to the lake to spend your birthday. One of these days I will get it together enough to not have to spend hours prepping to get us ready to go. Usually by the time we’re all in the car, packed, and ready to go, somebody’s crying, somebody’s huffing and puffing, and someone is hungry. It’s not unlike getting everyone to church on time on a Sunday, if I’m being honest.

Friday was a cluster anyway. Absolutely nothing went according to plan. It started when the dry cleaner delivered clothes to our house. And for the third time, it was not our clothes, but somebody else’s. Simon told me I needed to pull the plug on them, which made me really sad, like I was having to break up with my boyfriend or something. “But it’s so easy!” I moaned. “They’re picking the clothes up here and then they deliver them! The system was working! THE CLOTHES ARE GETTING CLEAN.”

“Right,” he replied. “Except they’re not delivering our clothes.”

Touche. I mean, I can’t argue with that, can I? So there was that. And then a few hours later, I pulled up in the driveway after doing a Target run at warp speed only to realize that my back tire on the new car was hissing air. Like loudly spurting. So I spent a solid hour of the already maxed-out day sitting in the rubber-scented tire shop. Then I went to buy my own birthday cake and since I was already on a roll, decided to go run a bunch of other errands too after dropping off the cake at our house to sit in the fridge. At this point, the baby was happy so I hopped back in the car. And as I pulled up at the pharmacy to pick up a prescription, I realized I had left my credit card on the bed. At home. After dropping off the cake. OMG. Oh wait – but I have my new card…which I needed to activate … (because my credit card number had been stolen and used to buy gas in Austin the week prior), but I couldn’t do that because I DIDN’T HAVE MY PIN NUMBER IT’S SITTING ON THE COUNTER AT HOME BY THE OLD CREDIT CARD OMG OMGOMGOMGOMG. OMG SERIOUSLY KILL ME NOW. So at this point I beelined to Johnnie’s for an iced tea because it was happy hour which means I can get said iced tea for $1.25 in scraped-together coins from the bottom of the diaper bag. YES.

By the time I picked up Jude from school, I was a hot mess of emotion. And we somehow managed to pull it together and leave juuuuust in time to hit 5 o’clock traffic on the way out of town. But then two hours later, we were all calmer and happier as we pulled into Carlton Landing.

“What did you do for your birthday?” I’ve been asked since then. “Absolutely nothing,” I reply. And that was exactly as I wanted it. We ate enormous pieces of cake all weekend long (wedding cake – white cake with buttercream frosting), lounged around by the pool, took walks to nowhere, loved on the baby, and drank copious amounts of iced tea with wedges of Meyer lemons and oranges.  For dinner on Saturday night, we drove to Krebs to eat at Pete’s Place, an Italian restaurant that basically only serves spaghetti and meatballs (they serve other stuff, but that’s the main gist of it). Afterwards, we bobbed around in the hot tub before eating another enormous slice of cake on our front porch by the light of the silvery moon.

My presents were the cutest tank top from Anthropologie (appropriate stripe, non?), and some fun little office supplies. Now I’m dead set on figuring out who can manufacture custom Pencil Shavings Studio pencil boxes for me. Because how fab would that be?

All weekend long I thought to myself, “What a difference a year makes.” A year ago at this time we were getting near to closing on the lake house and I was pregnant with Archer without even knowing it. We laughed about how crazy it was moving into the house over Memorial Day and all the litany of things that went wrong. For better or worse, every year brings something new, doesn’t it? Now excuse me while I go eat some (more) cake.