Katie's birthday

My glorious birthday is March 7th and since my friends know what a special day it is, they threw me a great birthday party of all my favorite things. It actually turned into a birthday weekend, but you'll see what I mean as we go.
My party started Friday night at the Nicholasville Wine Shop. They have tastings every week so we enjoyed the free wine and chose bottles for the dinner yet to come. Here's me, Bekah Terrey, and Grace at the Wine Shop.

My birthday happened to fall on the weekend when tons of snow fell all across Kentucky. This did not deter the gang from preparing a meal reminiscent of those we had in Italy last May. Here's Lyndee chilling the dough for home-made gnocchi...in the snow.

Unfortunately, Grace's recipe for gnocchi was off in its "this recipe feeds so many people" field. We made enough dough to feed the entire US Army gnocchi for a year. We rolled and cut gnocchi balls for at least an hour. Luckily, Chris was lounging at the table, picking his guitar.

The gnocchi was topped with one of two sauces: a beef and bell peppers tomato sauce, or a basil pesto sauce. Though we didn't end up eating until 10:00pm and were starving, we were still stuffed way too soon for all the gnocchi we had:) However, that did not keep us from moving on to dessert. Knowing my love for all things lemon or mint, they made one dessert for each: lemon bars and a mint chocolate cheesecake. Note for future birthday desserts - blowing out candles on a dessert covered with powdered sugar can be problematic. See picture below.

Everyone slept over at our house that night and the next morning we sent the men in the kitchen to cook us some breakfast. I'm not sure Ben got enough sleep - or maybe he had too much gnocchi the night before.

After breakfast, we crashed in the living room, laughed as Grace danced to 80's music, and were generally lazy bums. It was the best "after-birth" party ever. But wait, even then, the party was not yet over. With so much snow on the ground, we went sled-ridding later that night at Jacobson Park and Shriner's Hospital. Eric wrapped himself, literally, around a light pole. Lyndee almost went skidding out onto Richmond Road. We busted two inflatable tubes. Play Hard.

All in all, it was the best on-going birthday party ever. Italy, vino, candles, mint, sleep-over, laughing, almost peeing my pants. It was all good!

Eric's Birthday

This post is so long overdue I can't even remember half the details of possibly the best birthday party ever thrown. So instead, I'm going to post pictures from the night to help me piece the events together.

By the way, Eric is our Opthomologist friend. He likes to work with exploding eyeballs. We like to pretend we're cool doctors, too.

We opened the night with blood shooters - kool-ade and vodka in blood vials. They were tasty, especially the AB+ type.

We did eat dinner: Eric's favorite - pot roast with potatoes and carrots, freshly made rolls, and apple pie for dessert. We also enjoyed Urine Shooters - yes, lemonade and vodka served in urine cups. Ben's presentation - coming out the bathroom, tying his scrubs, and then pulling out the urine shooters - was hilarious to say the least. Bottoms up!

Remember how we all wanted to be doctors? Well, this is how Chris ate dinner....

Our first birthday game required Eric to diagnosis diseased eyeballs. They were real endemics and real people were hurting. Luckily Eric diagnosed almost all the balloon eyeballs correctly. Among our favorites were cellulitous eye, wormy eye, blephoritis, and halos.

Our second birthday game was pin the scalpel on the eyeball. Yes we put a blindfold on Eric; yes we spun him several times and made him very dizzy; and yes, we put a real scalpel in his hand...to poke his eye out with. Luckily, Eric pinned the scalpel directly on the pupil with skill. I wonder how many times he's been dizzy and still worked with a scalpel??

The third birthday game was "Shoot Your Eye Out" Hole - a slight derivation on the popular corn hole.

"Shoot Your Eye Out" Hole was followed, somehow, by spitting ping pong balls at each other and then catching them in the mouth. Unfortunately, I am told, not everyone caught theirs, so some ping pong balls got a bit fuzzy from the carpet. Perhaps we had a few to many of those shooters.

Doesn't it look like Eric had a great time at his birthday party?