Weekend Celebrations

Friday night we met up with Mo and Buckley to toast the newly engaged couple. There was a lot of laughing and a lot of champagne.

I'm thrilled to see these two looking so happy, and I'm more than a little excited to start talking wedding plans!

On Saturday, there was more champagne and more celebrating when Tom and I headed to Palm Springs to celebrate our joint entre into our thirties. We arrived at the Viceroy around one o'clock and the early check-in, free upgrade gods smiled upon us. As soon as we arrived, the super accommodating staff handed us glasses of champagne, ushered us to our pool-view suite, and conspired with me to hide Tom's fabulous, top secret birthday present in storage until his actual birthday on Sunday.

The Viceroy has a hip, Mad Men kind of feel. It's decorated in mostly black and white with splashes of bright yellow; the whole place is very swank.

{The living room and bar of our fancy pants suite}

{The bedroom was all white, very soothing. You know, to recover from all the stress of relaxing by the pool.}

{One of the pools}

We had lunch by the pool and then returned to our room to find a fruit and cheese platter with a Happy Birthday note from the Viceroy staff. Big points, Viceroy, big points.

As it turned out, Palm Springs must have known that we were coming because they scheduled their Festival of Lights Christmas parade for Saturday night.

Later, there were more drinks...on the house (again, well done Viceroy).

After that, it was Christmas movie time. Nothing like ringing in your thirties with The Family Man.

Sunday was Tom's actual birthday, so I started the day by presenting him with the thirty gifts that I have been planning since early September.

{Thanks to Tom's parents for providing the photos of him through the years.}

I tied a different childhood photo of Tom to each of the gifts and had fun listening to him explain the story behind each one.

Because I'm not that creative, roughly half of the thirty gifts were scratch off tickets...

{Despite all of the scratching, the only success was a win of one free ticket. We'll have to see how that plays out.}

Then came big reveal number one.

After the presentation of the ipad, Tom was appropriately overwhelmed and fully believed that the birthday gifting was over. We headed to the hot tub to enjoy some fresh air before hitting the road for the trip home. At some point, I made an excuse to return to the room only to return to the spa area with the big birthday surprise - a 1967 ('63?) Gibson ES45 that had been safely tucked away for several months courtesy of Uncle Donald. Now those numbers and letters mean little to me, but according to my husband, this is one badass guitar. Much planning and generosity on Uncle Donald's part led up to this point, and I couldn't wait to present the guitar to Tom... My parents had escorted the guitar home from Spain in October, and I had been dying to tell Tom about it ever since. It was well worth the wait.

Please excuse the photo sequence; I wanted to make sure that Uncle D could vicariously enjoy the gift bestowing experience...

{Yes Tom, you really get to keep it.}

At this point, the day was pretty already a guaranteed success, but we topped it off with Sprinkles cupcakes just the same.

{Happy Birthday, Baby!}

My birthday followed right behind Tom's, and it turns out that I have the best husband, family, and friends that a girl could hope for.... Plus,I succeeded in securing some reflections this year. More to follow...