Twelve Makes a Dozen: My Jazzy Birthday

I know you are all just dying to know how I spent my birthday, but since I didn't get to sleep in much yesterday, I took advantage today and didn't drag myself out until about 10:00. Yeah, my sweetie is amazing! He ran the carpool for me this morning and got the elementary kids out the door so I could just turn off the alarm.

So a few weeks ago after one of our Jr. Jazz games, I was handed an envelope with tickets for an actual Jazz game for the team. The first thing I noticed as I pulled them out was that the game was scheduled for my birthday. Since it's a rare day that my family can afford to see a professional sports team, I knew that I would be spending my birthday that way. As the head coach, I got two tickets and Crafty got two tickets. As it turned out, Sport and Scout also had tickets to the same game. Since teams weren't sitting together anyway and my tickets were scattered, I kept six that were together and handed off the others to my team. That meant we could take all the kids living at home except the Drama Queen and Teach since Curly and Baby Doll didn't need tickets. Then yesterday morning, we got two more tickets from one of the girls who couldn't go. Thankfully, they happened to be on the same row as the six I kept.

So just before six o'clock, we piled all twelve of us in the van and

we were off. We left the house in plenty of time to get downtown, but the freeway was packed and traffic was barely moving so we took State street for a mile or so and when we finally got downtown, the game had already started. We were driving our big white van and I didn't want to have to walk very far with all the little ones, so I directed my sweetie to the closest $10 lot we could find. They happened to have ONE parking spot left right in front that could accommodate a van the size of ours.

We hustled everyone to the crosswalk and across the busy road. We stood in line at the door for several moments and then got everyone checked in. We tossed our keys and phones into a little plastic box as we entered the metal detector and then we waited for Sport to unload the half dozen Hot Wheels cars he had in his pocket.

I knew that Sport's tickets were for another section, but I didn't realize that they were on the completely opposite side of the arena. I had planned to have the Dog Walker sit with him, but since I had all the older girls, I sent my sweetie to hang out with the boys. We partnered up and climbed the steep stairs to our seats. Baby Doll was restless and unhappy from the get-go. Curly couldn't sit still for 30 seconds at a time. We kept passing the two of them up and down the row to keep them occupied.

Sometime during the second quarter, they were tossing t-shirts into the crowd and I had to grab the Prima Donna's shirt to keep her from falling when the parachute landed two rows in front of us. It's a rare day when the nose-bleed seats get any freebies! Later in the game, the section right next to ours was given little yellow boxes when they were chosen "Lucky Section of the Game." One lady tossed her box to the Dog Walker. He was so excited when he pulled out a wrinkled Jazz shirt. Crafty pulled it on over her shirt since it was too small for the Dog Walker and wore it proudly for the rest of the evening. She even tied her coat around her waist so it was still visible when we were leaving the building.

The Jazz lost the game in a double-overtime and we were late getting home, but the kids had fun and we ate ice cream around the kitchen table while I finished reading them the last two chapters of a book Crafty needed to read for school.

We'll have a real party with cake and everything on Sunday when we can get all the kids and Grandpa here, but for now, this birthday turned out just right.