Sweet Sixteen!

Where has all the time gone???

Thursday night into Friday the 9th, Kevin was so mad at the new leasing office manager Gwen that he laid awake for three hours before finally falling asleep around 2:00am. And then when I woke up for work at 5:00am he decided to get up as well.

After writing the anonymous letter that he's already posted here (in which he would have called out Gwen's lies regarding the use of power strips in our apartment, had she not corrected those lies on her own), he then spent the remainder of last night writing three drafts of another letter in response to the one she left on our door regarding our stairwell camera and Ruth's:

He'll be posting his own writeup, I'm sure. But basically he wanted to call Gwen's bluff on threatening us with a cease notice and eviction, and to challenge her to produce a citation from the verbiage of our lease agreement that backs this claim (since neither he nor I could find anything).

I was totally on board with this, but he also wants to threaten legal action, which I don't see the need to do.

But anyway, after writing three separate drafts the night before, he woke up at 5:00am and wrote a fourth one from scratch, sent it to me at work, we went back and forth on his word choices in a few places, and then I finally gave my approval that he could walk it over to the front office.

Which he did. So we'll see what happens!

Birthday Dinner #1

Friday night was Riley's first birthday dinner: Just her, me, and Kevin.

It had been a long time (about 48 whole hours) since Riley had had a good steak, so she chose Outback Steakhouse!

Riley and I each got steak, and Kevin got a burger packed with so much stuff that I didn't even know how he was going to get it in his mouth!

Then it was time for dessert!

And even though we had told our waitress when we first got seated that Riley did not want them to make a big fuss about her birthday, she must have forgotten about that by the time she had brought us drinks, and then appetizers, and then dinner.

So when dessert arrived, so did the entire staff:

Riley handled it like a champ... And in return she got a free "Chocolate Tower for 2":

Even though it was the size of her head, she decided it would be a "Chocolate Tower for 1":

About 20% of the way in, I asked her how it was going.

And finally, on our way home from Outback, we dropped Riley off at Kassie's for a sleepover.

Birthday Dinner #2

Then on Saturday the 10th, we headed over to Catherine and Ron's for family birthday dinner.

Riley had requested Taormina's for dinner and ice cream cake for dessert.

Liv wasn't initially in a smiling mood, but Uncle Kev's pretty good at getting her to crack.

Now, with all that talk of buttcheese, who's ready for cake?

First, we sing!

Then we feast!

And then Riley gets rich!

The spot price for silver has shot up over $100/oz in recent weeks, so Kevin was teasing Riley that his parents must really like her a lot more this year since they gave her a $100 coin instead of just a dinky $40 coin like they had last year :)

They also gave her some cash to spend, as did Kelly and Steve.

Then it was Kevin's turn:

But really, his actual gift was that he had bought Riley a copy of Minecraft and "The Orange Box" to play on her new laptop :)

Wait, no. Not that orange box.

This one:

And finally it was my turn!

I gave her some makeup pencils... and all the makeup she had put on her list for Bradley to get her that he ended up not getting:

Then a Betty Boop T-shirt and PJ shorts:

Then two cute little jars I had found.

I put a labubu doll in the first:

And $200 in the second: