Birthday Festivities, Day 2 and 3

This has been one of the best birthdays ever! I celebrated it over 3 DAYS! Friday, after work, my family came over to the house and we had a big dinner (wow, shocker). Dad bought sushi from a local place I like a lot (top left), my aunt made sticky rice (top right), and my mom prepared 2 hot pots- one for the "kids" table and one for the adult table (not pictured). So freakin' good. My cousin picked up a red velvet cheesecake from The Cheesecake Factory. Yeah, I had it on Wednesday, BUT it was so good that I had to have it again, just so that everyone could try the yumminess. Those are some of my cousins in the bottom right picture. Yep, I have a big family.
Today was Day 3 of the festivities...this time with some friends- Meg and Suzie. Hooray for crafty loot! Thanks, Meg! I'm especially excited to use those chipboard embellishments and dive into the DCWV mat stack. Notice the summery theme? I think Meg's ready for warmer weather. I think everyone in MD/DC/VA is too. I dunno what I'm going to do with the beaded embellishments because they look too pretty to use! Suzie made some sweet potato raisin muffins, which were really really good. That's why they are almost all gone. She also arrived with a pretty spring-y plant that smelled good. Hopefully, Mom can find a place for it outside. We attempted to go to the Cheesecake Factory for dinner, but the wait was an hour long. Sorry. I'm hungry NOW. We ended up going to Bertucci's instead. Equally as yummy. Their blood orange margarita was a nice addition to the dinner. We came back to the house to eat more cake (there were a few slices leftover from yesterday so I could share) and continue conversation.
Here's today's card. The background story is that one of my co-workers wanted me to make a card with an alpaca on it. o_0 Ummm, what? Uhhh, sure. I'm up for a challenge. I found a llama model on YouTube, but the video went too quickly and there were no audio directions. BlAH! Then I tried a camel model and thought that I could just fold down the hump. Mmmnope. SIGH. Then I decided to modify a horse origami model and that was the closest that I came to an alpaca. At first, the card only had the origami model on it. Then, I added the ears and tail. And then my beta tester said "The eyes totally make the origami animals great." Oook. So then I stuck an eye on the guy, and this is probably as good as the card's going to get.

So that's the end of my birthday news...there might be more when I get my sister's present in the mail. Niiight for now!