Brian's Birthday

I realized as I sat down to write this post that I only had pictures of food to share... not surprising since this is about Brian's birthday. :) Since food is a big part of celebrating his day, I guess I'll start there.

This year, Brian's birthday day fell on a Sunday. We continued our tradition of sushipalooza, which, for those who don't know, is basically a dinner of all you can eat sushi for him. Brian loves sushi, and the poor guy doesn't get a lot of it (read: any) at home because I don't like fish when it's cooked, let alone raw. We started the tradition in 2010 with a night of homemade sushi. Since we've moved to NYC, where fish is more fresh and we have a wider variety available to us, we've become lazy and just order sushi from a nearby Japanese restaurant. So this year, we did sushi the day before his birthday, so we wouldn't have to order out on Sunday. Even though I don't partake of the sushi (I stopped and picked up a cheeseburger for myself), I do enjoy sushipalooza as a bystander. It's so fun to see how excited Brian gets when the sushi arrives, and I love to see his "food face" (named by me, it's a unique and extremely cute facial expression made by Brian while he is eating his favorite foods) that he pulls over and over when eating it. 

Along with all the sushi, he ordered a small side of seaweed salad. It was a very pretty green, but a little too slimy for my taste.

Brian isn't a big fan of cake, so for desert I made him a lemon meringue pie from scratch (recipe from Andrea Westover). Well almost from scratch, I cheated and bought a pie crust. He had a lot of fun putting the peaks on the meringue before I popped it in the oven. It turned out perfectly, and we enjoyed it over the next few days.

His main present from me was a new coat, which he's been needing/wanting for awhile now. I actually gave him the coat a week early because it's been so cold. It is a coat from a company called SCOTTeVEST that he found online. It has 26 pockets, and if you know Brian, you know that it is his dream coat. The man needs multiple pockets, all of which he fills with a menagerie of objects. Originally, he wanted the style that had 32 pockets, but it wasn't made to be as warm as the 26-pocket version, so in the end he went with the latter. When he opened it up, he was so excited and immediately began checking out all the pockets and telling me all about them. He was like a little kid at Christmas. I tried to record him, but when he noticed what I was doing, his explanations got a little less euphoric and lot more serious/review-like.

Besides his coat, he got a new temple tie and a gift card from my parents, a Superman wall hanging from his parents, and a book from me. 

He said that it was the perfect birthday. I'm so glad he had such a great day!