"The husband. Twenty Six. Years. Ok?"

That's how I tried to explain the banner to my ayi when she came to do our dishes this morning.

Banners make everything more festive. Don't you think?

I'm not sure if I've talked about this or not before, but we have an ayi which is a word that I've discovered can mean virtually anything but in our case means house-helper.  She comes twice a week and does our dishes and mops the floor on Saturdays.  Usually we aren't home when she's here so on Wednesday I come home and it's like magical kitchen elves snuck in and made my kitchen all sparkley and nice.

But today I was home, and after two months of Mandarin lessons I was finally able to communicate with her a little bit. It was a fun surprise when we discovered the fact. It went something like this:

She saw the desktop picture on my computer which is of my absolutely adorable neice, Reed and she said the words "beautiful baby" as she was walking back into the kitchen. And I said "Oh! I understand that!" In English, yes.

Now normally, we both just smile and shrug our shoulders and laugh when one of us tries to talk to each other, but this time I understood and I got excited. I quickly tried more words, "baby husband sister. niece? come here! China!" Which she, of course, understood to mean that Reed and Sarah are coming to visit us. She asked "when" and I said "three-of (weeks...weeks...) um...one month!" For some reason my word for weeks was failing me. Then she asked how old Reed was and I told her "Yi-ge Yue!" and she looked shocked which was my cue to realize I'd said "month" instead of "year" so we fixed that, but not before agreeing that regardless, Reed was a big baby.

Anyway, yeah, I made a banner for Joel's birthday. I know he's not a kid and I didn't need to decorate, especially in this fashion, but I just thought it would be fun. Plus, the two desserts I baked took FOUR HOURS to cook in my toaster oven so I was tied to the apartment anyway so why not?

In the end we fit eleven people into our living room after a fun dinner at a local Mexican place. We came back here for triple chocolate cake and brownies, of the four hour toaster oven variety, and peanut butter banana bread that our friend Tim got up and baked before school as a special gift for Joel. I got to introduce one of my very favorite games, tele-pictionary to a few people in the group who'd never played, and a grand time was had by all.

The group at our apartment.

Joel successfully added another year to his resume. He's currently enjoying the six week stretch that he's older than I am.  The only thing that could have made the celebration better is if we could have had you all here with us. Birthdays are bittersweet. It's fun to celebrate with new friends, but you miss your friends from home and family more than ever. Here's to another year of Joel :) Now I'm going to have a brownie for breakfast.