Birthday Celebration, catch-up-style

As many of you know, the past month has been super busy for us. Not as busy perhaps as those of you who have multiple kids (or kids period), but busy none the less. We moved out of our apartment last week and the preparations for that kept us quite busy. As well as the 44 private violin/viola lessons I've given in the last two weeks. That and a bit of this and that kept us on our toes and exhausted. I'm starting to get the feeling that's what most adults feel for the majority of their lives. If that's the case, I think I can totally deal with it as long as there's good food, music and company thrown in the mix. Anyhow that is so off track. My birthday was almost a month ago and I managed to snap some pictures of the very special day, complete with flowers from my studly hubs:

Here are my birthday flowers in a vase a made at MICA three years ago. And for the record, these flowers lasted over 3  1/2 weeks! I had to throw them out when we moved, but they were still flourishing  at the time.

Karl made a deliciously fluffy cheese omelet. 

I even pulled out  these too cute paper napkins from Norway for the special brunch.

The brunch Karl made for me: omelet, cinnamon buns, bananas and grapefruit. Yum! On the table you can also see my gift (well, it's wrapped): an awesome heavy duty garlic press! (See how I used it in the post to follow)

Us full of the yummy brunch! (Notice the nice earrings my mom got me for my birthday)

For dinner we went out to a Mediterranean restaurant called Arugula. Everything we had was delicious, delicious, delicious!  For my entree I had pumpkin and ricotta stuffed ravioli with toasted filberts on a bed of....arugula!

Karl had the 1/2 roasted chicken with wild rice and ratatouille. That also was incredibly good.

For dessert we had the stuffed filo with banana and  chocolate filling. 

So that was my birthday- the short and sweet version. Probably two of my favorite birthday gifts was the "karlmark" card (from Karl of  course) and the box of goodies from my mom. What are some favorite gifts that you have received?