I woke up this morning to a big hug and kiss from my baby, and the sweetest sounding "Happy birthday Mommy" that I've ever heard.  I returned his hug.  He snuggled beside me on the bed.  Then without warning, my adorable child grabbed my shirt between his chubby little hands and blew his nose into it.  "I had to, Mommy, because there was no tissue," he said.  Hm.  Happy birthday to me.  I could barely keep from laughing.

We had a lot of errands to run today in preparation for my parents visit-- tomorrow!  They changed the date of their arrival, so I had to cram a week of prep into a few days.  One would think that living in the city with everything close by, shopping would be easier.  I'm not sure why this is not the case for us.  Perhaps it's just part of parenting.  Or traffic.  Or the fact that we can't find everything at one store.  Sometimes we can't find ANYTHING at one store, especially when gift shopping.  But whatever the reason, we were gone for five hours, running hither and tither.

Our last stop was Starbucks.  Joshua went in with John to buy my gift.  When asked what he wanted to give me for my birthday, he told John "a cup!"  They were in there for a very long time.  This is why:

It's the perfect size for me, as I don't drink much in the way of hot drinks....and I L-O-V-E the personalized drawing by Joshua.  It's my first "Mommy" cup.  John pointed out quite a few different options, but Joshua selected this one on his own.  It's perfect.

I was hard pressed coming up with a last-minute birthday gift for my dad.  His birthday is in  August, but I won't see him, so we wanted to do all our gift-giving this week.  I thought I'd have to wait or send something in the mail, but thanks to Starbucks and the new chip in Dad's old favourite mug, we found another perfect option:

Joshua decorated the cup with another original design.  This one had to be baked afterwards.  Fun stuff!