I had a very nice birthday. There were originally 10 of us for lunch, but two people got sick, and another one had a sick child, so they opted out. And I do appreciate them not bringing their germs to share.

I left work early so I could stop at the DMV and renew my driver's license. I'd been putting it off because I thought I had until the end of the month to renew it -- but hey, I was planning on leaving work early anyway, and the lines would probably be minimal in the middle of the afternoon.

It's a good thing I did, too, because I discovered that sometime in the last five years the law has changed, and the license actually expires on your birthday, so yesterday was my very last day to do it.

So now I have a new driver's license, and a new driver's license number (license numbers used to be the holder's SSN unless they requested otherwise; pretty much immediately after the last time I renewed mine, they changed the law so that license numbers couldn't be the SSN, but still-valid licenses were grandfathered). Naturally, the new checks we just ordered have the wrong number on them, so I'll have to be scratching it out and writing the new number in for the next six months or so.

Guess I'll learn the new number pretty quickly.

Anyway, I spent the rest of the afternoon loafing around (playing Warcraft, of course). When Matt and Penny got home, I watched Sesame Street with Penny and sent Matt out for Chinese for dinner so I wouldn't have to cook. The opening skit was something about it being "Try A New Food Day" and while Penny doesn't usually get caught up in these things, yesterday she seemed very excited about the idea of trying a new food.

So when Matt came back with the Chinese food, I put some egg-drop soup in her soup cup, and some rice and moo-shu vegetables in her bowl, and put them in front of her. (She's had rice before, and she's actually had the soup before, but probably doesn't remember it.)

She picked up a sliver of vegetable dubiously. "What's that?"

"Bamboo shoot. Try it! It's a new food!"

She put it her mouth, and reached for another. "What's that?"

"That's cabbage." She ate that one, too. She asked to try the plum sauce, but decided she didn't really like it.

"What's in the soup?"

"Egg."

"Mmm! Yummy yummy egg!"

She ate everything in her bowl (except maybe half a spoonful of stuff that she couldn't maneuver onto her spoon) and all her soup, and asked for more (excpet I'd eaten all the rest of the soup by then). Yay, Sesame Street!

So after we cleaned up a bit, Matt lit the candle I'd stuck in one of the cupcakes, and he and Penny sang "Happy Birthday" for me (she did, actually, participate in the singing, which is new) and then she "helped" me blow out my candle. By which I mean that she blew it out before I managed to take a breath.

She got a miniature cupcake and gleefully attacked the icing. When it was done, she asked if she could have more icing on her cupcake, and I told her no, there had been pleny of icing on it. Astonishingly, she did not whine, and she did not tell me she was all done. She sat there and actually ate the cake part.

Then Matt took her upstairs for a bath while I made brownies, and my parents called to wish me a happy birthday, so I talked to them for a while.

All in all, it was a really nice day.

--Liz