Beginning of my birthday celebration!

This weekend was AWESOME!!! I love tradition. If I do one thing once I feel like I have to repeat it over and over again because it's "tradition." Last year John and I were living apart (He was working down here and we hadn't sold our first house so I was living in the first house and working at my old job) and I would come down every weekend and we would do some type of housework/ remodeling project together. All I wanted for my birthday weekend was to NOT have to paint or sand or hammer for all of Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I wanted to go strawberry picking, because I love strawberries and when I was little we used to go and it just seems like a cute, fun thing to do. Also, I saw ads for a crawfish festival in downtown Columbia and I really wanted to go because I am a dork and totally into cheesy festivals. (I dragged my whole family to the Okra Strut last year. Go me!) Well, the crawfish festival was AWESOME!!! They shut down several blocks of Columbia and there is a ton to do at the festival. They have bands on two stages, but the stages are far enough apart that you can still have a conversation and hear yourself think. There was a ton of Bud and Bud Light but there was also, to John's delight, a stand that had the snobby/ weird beers so he could drink his snobby beer and be happy. And the crawfish! OH. EM. GEE. This was my first time eating crawfish and there were so many people sitting at the tables under the main tent that John and I had to sit on the sidewalk, like several dozen other people. We had no clue how to eat crawfish so we turned to another young couple next to us and chatted with them as they explained it to us. It was SO wonderful! The crawfish are live and steamed right in front of you, then have a ton of spices dumped on them, and away they go into a big styrofoam container for your enjoyment.

Well, since we did that once, we must now do it every year. I had been talking up my (first) birthday weekend for weeks: strawberry picking followed by the crawfish festival. On Friday night John was talking about his weekend plans and he mentioned how he wanted to work on home improvement stuff with one of his friends in the morning, then go to the crawfish festival. I got a little sad because I really wanted to pick strawberries. One of my aunts said she'd go strawberry picking with me and I called the strawberry farm to check their hours. Guess what? They were closed on Saturday to allow more berries to ripen! YAY!!!!!!!!!! No worries about missing berry picking with my sweet husband! I slept in on Saturday while John and his buddy did some work on our deck. The three of us headed to the crawfish festival and picked up two friends of ours along the way. Two MORE of our friends met us there, as well as our roommate and several of her work buddies. We had quite a group! The weather was PERFECT. It was in the mid 80s but the rain that has been ravaging the mid-South left us with some cloud cover, so it wasn't super hot. Everyone (minus me) got a beer and I stood in line to get crawfish. Two people in our group held a spot for us at the table and we sat down to dig in! DELICIOUS!!! It cracks me up because about half of the people were like, "Um, this is good, but it's too much work for such little meat." I'm so glad I grew up eating crabs! First, eating a crab is WAY more complex than eating a crawfish. With crawfish you twist off the torso and you're done. With crabs it's take off the legs, eat the claws, take off the apron, take off the top, take out the lungs and guts...crawfish are easy! After some delicious crawfish John told me the most beautiful words I could ever hear that day: "I'll be the DD." WOO HOO!!! I had one Bud Light (wow, that stuff really is water) and two beers from the snobby beer selection. There's a high gravity beer called Wild Blue that is DELICIOUS. That plus one shot made me a very happy girl.

I can't wait to do it again next year!