My 30th Birthday

May 16th was a big birthday for me - my 30th. I left my 20s behind and am facing my 30s head on. Unintentionally, instead of just celebrating on my birthday, the celebration sort of spread out for the next two days.

I had just gotten back into town on my birthday eve, late in the evening. As I usually do, I spent the first night back in St. Louis with my family and my pups.

When I awoke on my birthday morning, we had a lovely breakfast of popovers (my favorite breakfast) and yummy fruit salad. I spent the afternoon with my mom's therapy and service dog group celebrating their therapy dog class graduation. Speaking of pups, when I got home in between things, I found this amazingness on my doorstep from one of my besties.



Seriously? How cute is that?!

To top it off, I had a simply AMAZING dinner with my parents at a new-to-me restaurant called Niche. They have this thing on Monday where it's a prix fixe menu and it was AMAZING. We had a chop salad with romaine, radishes, bacon, tomatoes, goat cheese with a tarragon buttermilk dressing. We all chose the Flank Steak as our main course which came with blanched asparagus, pommes anna and topped with ramp maple butter. And ended with what they called Humboldt Fog which seemed to be a goat cheese, with granola, pear mostarda and crostini. We only let it drop once or twice that it was my birthday. Thankfully, a chic restaurant like that does something like this to let you know you're loved:



It's also the only part of our meal that I actually got 'on tape' because I ate the others up before I even thought of documenting the amazing dinner we had. So amazing that I wrote the chef a thank you note the next day. Because of therapy dog graduation, no birthday cake (a tradition in our house) was made.

The next morning, we all got up early and my parents picked me up to take my to my birthday surprise. I was told to bring my smaller camera, wear comfortable shoes and that they'd be by to pick me up at 8am. My surprise was a downtown tour of St. Louis... on Segways. Judge Segways all you want, but until you've been on one, you can't really judge. These aren't the big ones of mall-cop fame, but smaller ones. At first, you really think you're going to fall off and harm yourself because you haven't learned how to trust the equipment, but once you get the hang of it, it's really hard to give it back at the end of the tour. It was really a great way to see downtown St. Louis and have an experience on a Segway that I wouldn't normally have. I'm not sure who had more fun, my parents or me.



The Segway tour kind of wiped us out, plus an amazingly delicious and filling lunch at JBucks, so making of my birthday cake was postponed to Wednesday.

We made this cake last year, and I loved it so much that I wanted it again. I LOVE lemon poppyseed cake (my usual request), but you can't deny the excitement of carving into this amazing technicolor cake. It's a lot of fun to dye the different portions of batter.



Fresh out of the oven! What we didn't know, is that dome kinda spelled disaster.



Look at that amazingness!! For some strange reason, the cake fell in the middle and some of it wasn't cooked. But you know what, most of the cake was fully-cooked and amazing. So we ignored the part that didn't cook (unfortunately, most of it was purple!) and ate the cake anyway.



So all in all, a three-day celebration for a new decade - not too shabby! I'm really glad I was able to spend this birthday with my family. I only wish I had more friends in town to do a party as well. But there really wasn't much time this time 'round. Perhaps I'll have a belated celebration when I get back in July.