Birthday Ballooning

All I wished for for my birthday was flowers.  I wanted some pretty flowers to put in a vase on the dining room table.  Little did I know, Erik had bigger plans!

The night before my birthday, Erik suggested going out to dinner.  We don't dine out much, so I was extremely excited to hear he wanted to go out.  We chose a local restaurant with a patio, which was so much easier with the kids.  We ordered food on a "rock," which meant that they served the meat raw and we cooked it ourselves on a hot stone that they placed in the middle of our table.  It was so different and fun and  I loved celebrating my birthday over dinner.

The next morning, there were several alarms that went off at 4:15am.  When I heard them go off, I was so irritated with Erik because I thought he had just forgot to unset the alarms from the morning before when he had early appointments.  Instead of just laying in bed like he usually does when the alarms go off, he immediately got up and shut them off!  He then told me that I had to get up and that we were going somewhere.  I laid there until the last minute and drug my feet for the next hour, but we managed to drag the kids out of bed, too, and before I knew it, we were watching the sunrise as we sat at a gas station in the middle of the city.  Erik told us that we were waiting for something, but we had no idea what we were waiting for.  Eventually, a truck pulling a trailer pulled up.  On the side of the trailer was a hot air balloon.  I immediately started sweating!  Erik obviously planned this surprise without knowledge of my fear of heights and small spaces!  Luckily, it was too early to think too much and before I knew it, we were in a basket, hanging 1,000 feet above the city!

I spent hours putting together a video of our pictures and videos from our balloon ride.  I hope you go watch it!  I mostly wanted to put it together for my mom, who will probably never go on a hot air balloon ride, and for my mother-in-law who has ballooning on her bucket list!  It will be nice to show the kids when they are older, too, because I highly doubt any of them will remember their first hot air balloon ride!