My Birthday

I had a great weekend with the family celebrating my birthday.  I got to sleep in til almost 9!  Kevin and Kaitlyn took me to the mall.  We stopped in Pandora where I picked out a new charm for my bracelet.  Then Kevin let me indulge in my love of shoes! ❤

Please ignore the size of my massive feet, hahaha.

Grammy was awesome and watched the girls, so Kevin could take me out for dinner!  We went to The Grill Room.  They have an open kitchen and cook everything over a wood fire.  Plus they are one of the only restaurants in Portland that serve my much-loved escargot!  We had to document the massive mound of fries that came with Kevin's meal.  The picture really doesn't do it justice.  He couldn't even finish half of them!

I'm usually not to big on selfies, but considering I wore a nice dress and high heels for the first time in about a year AND did my hair and make-up I thought it had to be documented.

Kaitlyn picked out the cake... can you tell?  It's chocolate cake with chocolate icing and massive globs of balloon icing.  Amazingly yummy!

My best present of all though...

That's right!  Our family has grown again.  We are back up to our full contingent of cats.  We first met this big boy when Kaitlyn's troop took a tour of the Animal Refuge League. We immediately felt drawn to him and his personality and have been thinking of him for weeks.  Yesterday afternoon we went to the shelter to ask a few questions about him and determine if he would be a good fit for the family.  He's between 5 and 8 years old.  He'd been in a shelter somewhere north of Portland since September last year.  They no longer had room for him and shipped him down to the shelter here in January.  He was in rough shape when he arrived.  He had coat issues, needed a dentistry, and had a respiratory issues.  Most of those problems are completely gone, but the shelter says he has chronic respiratory problems. Basically he sneezes and wheezes a lot.  It sometimes sounds bad, but he's fine and it's not contagious to the other cats.  Kevin and I believe it's why he's been in the shelter so long.  He's the most loveable guy.  Many of the volunteers were talking about how he was their favorite and all of them came to say goodbye when he was ready to leave with us.  His shelter assigned name was "Clyde", but we have re-christened him Stormy.

Stormy has settled in nicely.  It's the easiest transition we've had with a new cat transition.  He and Frozen are having fun playing with each other now that Frozen is coming to terms that he will not be top cat in the household.  Of course, Stormy's coloring makes it difficult to find him sometimes...