An 80th Birthday Celebration

We were so blessed last week to travel to Illinois to see my parents and to celebrate their 80th birthdays with them. They were both born within a week of each other.

 

My sisters and myself, along with the youngest child in each family all went to celebrate with them. What a sweet time we had together.

 

I love where my parents live. It’s a small town but they live in the countryside and Autumn is so pretty there.

 

I don’t see many colored leaves here at my house, so seeing the beautiful tree they have in their backyard with red leaves was beautiful to me.

 

Birch bark tree – I wanted so badly to take some of the bark and write a little letter on it but I couldn’t get a piece big enough. 🙁

 

We girls did the planning, cooking and decorating. Of course, we had our little helpers along with us and they did a few things too.

 

For the special supper our menu was:

rib-eye steak

baked potatoes

roasted broccoli

homemade dinner rolls

mixed greens w/ bits of fruit and candied nuts

Dessert: key lime cheesecake

 

We had plans and expectations and at first things went smoothly…

 

One of my sisters was in charge of decorations – the one that always helps me out when there’s a graduation in the family. Like this one when our backyard was finished, this one, this one and this one!

 

 

I had wallet sized prints made of mom and dad’s childhood before I left and mounted them on scrapbook paper to be placed at each person’s place setting. There was a different picture at every seat.

 

 

 

I made these little signs while I was there and my sis had the bright idea of putting them in picture frames. That gave it a much nicer flair than anything I was thinking of doing.

 

 

 

Mom and Dad loved seeing what had been done in their dining room.

 

While all this was lovely, things were going awry in the food department.

I was in charge of making rolls for the meal. Things started off fine…  The dough was put into a bowl to rise but then after an hour, it still had hardly risen. Finally, we moved the dough to a warmer location. But time was not on our side at this point. We were supposed to eat between 5:30-6:00. This was going to delay that.

 

The potatoes were placed into the oven and that’s when we discovered mom and dad had a slight issue with their oven’s electronics. For some reason, it would shut off at periodic times and not come back on again for as long as 20-30 minutes. So a careful eye was kept on the oven to issure our potatoes would cook!

Next item on the menu: steaks

Big sis fired up the grill and then dad decided to check on her. Shortly he returns and asks mom where his coat is because he has to run to town to get more propane. It was completely empty! After getting that taken care of, the steaks could begin once again.

Since things were running late because of the steaks and the oven still wasn’t cooperating, so the broccoli that was to be roasted was only getting short spurts of cooking time because of it continuing to shut off and us having to wait for it to cool down before we could try turning it on again. We then added the rolls during one of the times it was working and it was at that time that we all decided to get some pictures…

Mom and dad with their daughters…

 

Grandpa and Grandma and their granddaughters…

 

Mom and dad with their oldest daughter and her youngest child…

 

…their middle child with her youngest…

 

…and then their baby with her baby…

 

We covered it all.

Every pose we could think of that we would possibly want.

And forgot about the steaks!

By now, one side of them was getting rather well done. They were finished up, placed in a pan inside the grill with the heat off while the other things were finishing.

Or so some of us thought…

but the fire really wasn’t off! It was just set to low so the steaks weren’t as juicy as they could have been. 🙁

In the meantime…

the oven kept shutting off! Out of desperation we took the rolls and placed them in the toaster oven, cooking 6 at a time.

BUT…

somehow the toaster was also on at the same time (to my understanding) and the tops of the rolls were burnt! Woe is me! I speak truth. All of these things happened.

It was quite comical actually.

So here was our meal and although the steaks may not look so bad, some were definitely of a wrong color.

At least our first course went smoothly.

 

 

The girls sang “God’s Been Good in My Life”.

 

And we wrapped up the evening with a slide show I had put together of various friends and family that had sent videos and wishes for a blessed birthday.

 

It was a lovely evening – memorable and precious at the same time.

Oh! And we had keylime cheesecake to finish up our evening and it wasn’t burnt one little bit. Awww. It was actually quite fabulous!

 

Mom said she didn’t think we could have did anything more to make it a nicer evening, so I guess we succeeded in making them feel special and showing them a little of how much we love them.

May you have a blessed year mom and dad and many more birthdays. ♥

Save