Birthday Dinner Party

Yesterday, was my Mom's birthday. She amazingly enough is still only 39 years old! I have somehow passed her up!

Our family has many birthday's in May, and since we usually go out to dinner for the grown up birthdays in the family, with three grown up birthdays in May we decided to just go out once to celebrate them all! We did that on May 5th, my Dad's birthday.

So my dilema was what to do for my mom...then as usually I came up with a great idea the day before her birthday! I called her good friend and invited her and her fun husband, to come over to a surprise dinner party!

We feed the kids early, treated them to Micky D's "buy a medium or large drink, get a free chicken sandwich" deal. Then I marinated chicken breasts in my special marinade, Tim grilled them, the girls made salad and cut up fresh pineapple! I set the table with a pretty cloth, our china, pretty red goblets, and crystal goblets. Lindsay bought her grandma some beautiful Alstoemeria in a burgandy color. These we used as a centerpiece.

My parents arrived and my mom was unaware that her friends were coming until they arrived! Yea, we surprised her! The six of us adults, ate a lovely dinner and then the kids joined us for cake. This is my mom's favorite cake. We make a yellow layer cake, cut up fresh strawberries, put a bit of organic cane sugar on them. Then we whip up whipping cream and then put whipped cream and strawberries between the layers, and then frost the rest of the cake with the whipped cream! This is such a delicious, wonderfully light cake! Emily even put slits in a few strawberries, so they would fan out on the top of the cake!

Then presents and then my girls each played either piano or recorder for their grandma. We even got one of our guests to play acoustic guitar for us!

It was a lovely dinner party and evening.

Happy Birthday Mom.