Dirty 30!!!

Cody Michael Kelley is officially 30 years young!!!  My sweet hubby turned the BIG 3-0 on October 27th!!!  Since this birthday is a big milestone, I wanted to do something extra special for his birthday.  But...I didn't want to do anything that he wouldn't have fun with or be irritated with something I had done...like throw a surprise party.  In fact, I very distinctively remember him telling me a long time ago that he didn't want a surprise party when he turned 30...or any other year for that matter.  So, when I started realizing that it was time to start putting some plans together, I asked him what his ideal 30th birthday party would include.  Of course...he said his dream 30th birthday would have been some fabulous hunt to South Africa...but that wasn't exactly in the budget!  What he really wanted was just for all of his friends to get together and spend the weekend just hanging out as one big group...just like back in college.  Then, the question became...where do you want to go???  I threw out Austin, San Antonio, DFW...but he never would really say exactly where he wanted to go.  This conversation began in early July along with Josh and Abbie throwing out ideas too.  When he finally came to the decision on where to go, we were at Josh and Abbie's house during the first weekend in September.  And they say women can never make up their mind!  Hehe...just kidding!  We were all sitting around talking after an ACU football game and a girl's night out event at Betty and June (an adorable boutique in Abilene) when Josh said that if Cody wanted to go to the DFW area, his parents would love for us to come and stay at their house.  And from that moment on he was sold!  Sandra and LaDell are some of the most caring, generous, considerate, kind, loving people and they open their home to any of their three kiddos and their kids friends.  Josh said he would check with his parents to make sure that it would be ok for some of to stay at their hose the weekend of Cody's b-day...and they said yes!  Let the planning begin...

As soon as Cody made the decision on where he wanted to go for his b-day and we knew it would be ok for some people to stay at the Harrison's...I texted all of our friends the following day to give the FYI on the tentative plans for Cody's b-day weekend.  All-in-all there were 28 people that we sent out the invite too.  Because of the time of year that his b-day falls, several couples weren't able to go.  But...there were 10 people were able to make the trip to Ft. Worth and celebrate Cody turning 30!  We sort-of made some plans and then the rest of the weekend was just going to be up in the air.  Nothing was going to be stressful...and when you make lots of plans and have lots of stuff going on...it tends to make things stressful!  The only thing that was set in stone, was that we were going to go to Joe T. Garcia's for dinner and the Aaron Watson concert at Billy Bob's on Saturday night (the actual night of Cody's b-day).  I guess we also made dinner plans for Friday night...we just decided to have a chill family dinner at the Harrison's with all of us there together.  The rest of the weekend was just kinda up-in-the-air!

Because he didn't want a surprise party (and I was really ok with that because it would have been really hard for me to keep it from him), I still wanted to do something that he didn't know about.  I decided to just do something simple, but something that would celebrate Cody.  Since, I'm addicted to Pinterest, I turned to it for some party planning.  I just did a search for a 30th birthday party for men and got lots of super cute ideas.  At first, I wanted to do a theme, but then decided that doing black and white would be perfect!  His b-day is so close to Halloween...so it went perfect with how Sandra had their house decorated...absolutely adorable!  She's so talented!!!  I sort of put lots of different ideas together to come up with my final product.  I had some custom signs made on Etsy...four of them to be exact.  So many of the cute ideas I saw on Pinterest were candy bars, snack bars, sweet bars, etc.  I decided to incorporate those ideas for him.  The signs I had made were a "Happy Birthday" sign (obviously!), "Drinks," "Sweets," and "Treats" signs.  The treats sign was above a candy bar.  I looked up candy from the 80's and just got tons of bags of different kinds of candies that were popular in the 80's.  I may have gone overboard on this...I bought 12 bags of candy!  For the sweets bar, I bought double chocolate Chips-Ahoy, Oreos, and chocolate Teddy Grahams.  I also ordered a black and white topsy turvy cake...it turned out SO good!  The bottom layer was black and white stripes and the top layer was black and white diamonds.  On top of the cake, there were black and white stars on curvy metal stakes.  The last bar that I had was an actual drink bar.  I made a beer cake...complete with 30 beers, along with a liquor bouquet.  These were mainly for decoration...I think the boys broke into a few bottles on the liquor bouquet!  I also found a recipe for a black drink to add to the drink table.  Since this was all a surprise, Josh and Emory took Cody to Cabela's for a little manly shopping and then to Mi Cocina for a pre-dinner margarita.  The boys left early that Friday afternoon...and Abbie came to pick me up around 3:00 that afternoon so we could get on the road and get to the Harrison's house fairly early.  When we were a few minutes outside of town, we let Josh know that we were close and they left the Harrison's so us girls could set-up for the party and dinner!

When we were all done setting up, we called the boys and they headed back to the house.  In the meantime, us girls started chopping the veggies and making the salad while LaDell got the grill ready for the steaks and chicken.  A little bit later, the boys came strolling in through the garage door and Cody got his first look at his little birthday "surprise!"  It wasn't anything over the top...but he was really sweet about it and was excited to see the few little things all over the house that he didn't know about.  The boys hung out and talked with us in the kitchen while we finished up getting dinner ready.  When it was all in the oven, we moved to the living room and just sat around and talked for awhile before it was time to eat.  It was soon dinner time and we were all starving!  We piled our plates high and sat around the dinner table and talked and ate, and repeated that a few more times!  The rest of the night was spent catching up with friends, laughing, and getting ready to countdown Cody's birthday.  Josh decided to all have a birthday toast at the stroke of midnight to commensurate Cody's big 3-0!!!  After that...we all headed to bed to get some rest before the eventful day ahead!

Obviously this is cheesy...but we had to get a re-do of him seeing things for the first time!

Josh, Jen, and Cody...love them!!!  Nice booty Josh!!!



I'm not really sure what's going on in this picture...maybe talking to me from the looks of the pic below!



This is really cute of me...NOT!  Hehe...I'm in the middle of talking...shocker!

Gettin' some candy!!!

So much to choose from!!!

LOVE these girls!!!

THE CAKE!!!

Getting sung to...he protested...but we insisted!!!

Blowing out his candles!  HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!

Such great friends...love this group of boys!

The gang on Friday night!  Alex, Elle, and Jen's roommate, Jessica came over to celebrate with us!  XOXO

Precious girlies!!!

Oh my!  This is so typcial of these boys...crazy!

A successful beginning to an amazing birthday weekend!  I love you!!!

On Saturday, we woke up to Sandra cooking us a yummy breakfast in the kitchen.  We ate some yummy food, drank some delicious coffee and hung out for a little bit that morning.  Since we are CrossFit-aholics...we found a CrossFit box close by and headed that way to see what it was all about.  The closest one to Sandra and LaDell's house is CrossFit 817.  It's a 15,000 sq. ft. building full of CrossFit love!  They were actually having a competition that day...so we didn't get to workout...but we got to watch some other CrossFitters throw it down!  It was super fun to watch...and encouraging to know that we could have been right in the middle competing alongside all these other CrossFitters.  We stayed for about an hour, then headed back to the house.  The boys decided to head down to the Stockyards and watch the Texas Tech game at Chimys and we decided to go shopping!  We spent the afternoon doing our own thing...the guys being all manly watching football and the girls spending some quality time lunching and shopping.  When we got back to the house, it was time to clean up and get ready for some yummy Mexican food and an amazing concert with our best friends!  Dinner at Joe T.'s was amazing!!!  If you've never been before...you should really just take a day trip to go eat there...and have one of their famous margaritas!  Don't have two though...and don't ask me how I know this!  I've said before that Cody and I don't drink hardly ever...so two margaritas for me put me a little on the tipsy side.  Apparently it also makes me a Chatty Cathy!  Anyways...we had an amazing, yummy dinner and sat around the table just talking and laughing.  After dinner, we headed over to Billy Bob's for the Aaron Watson concert.  We had so much fun spending the night together laughing, talking, and just being carefree and silly!  After the concert, we headed back to the house, had a midnight snack, and sat around and talked for a little while longer before turning in.

Happy Birthday my love!!!

Jen and me!!!  We kinda look alike in this pic!!!  I love this precious girl!

A pre-dinner birthday drink!

Cheers!

These precious, amazing friends made Cody's birthday extra special!  Logan and Macee, Cody and Me, Josh and Abbie, Mark and Jacki, Jen, and Emory!Love you all!!!

Birthday dinner at Joe T.'s!!!  YUMMY!

All of us at dinner!!! 

LOVE this!!!  Jacki, Macee, and me.  These are precious, precious girls!

Birthday margaritas!  You can't go to Joe T.'s and not have one!

Oh yes we did!  Cody always begs to not have people sing to him on his birthday.  Obviously I didn't listen this time!  It was his 30th birthday...he was not getting out of being sung to this year!

This is priceless!  His face when he realized they were coming over to sing to him!!!

I think he made some new friends!

If you can't beat em...join em!!!

So...we decided to get dressed up and get on the bull at Billy Bob's!  We are having way too much fun with this!!!

Last pic of the night!  This is classic of us!  We all love each other so much...we are family!  We love to spend time together, have an amazing and fun time, and celebrate every occasion with one another!  Thank you to each and everyone of you who came down and made this weekend so special!!!  Happy 30th Birthday Cody!  I hope it was one you will always remember and cherish!!!

When Sunday morning rolled around and we were all awake...we were all still so sleepy and ready for some coffee and breakfast!  LaDell made a run to the store for the breakfast goodies...Sandra made us breakfast burritos...yum!!!  After we ate, we seriously laid around on the living room floor and on the couches and just kinda crashed.  None of us went back to sleep, but we just laid around watching movies for a little while.  Pretty soon, it was time for some lunch...our tummies told us so!  There is a BJ's right down the road from the Harrison's...so that's where we were headed!  It is always so good to eat there...I really don't know why we don't have one in Abilene.  When we got back to the house, we visited for a bit longer, then packed up our stuff and started to head home.  We made one more stop by Cabela's before officially getting on the road though!  The Harrison clan got Cody a gift card to there for his b-day...so he wanted to get a couple of things while we were still in town.  Once we were done, we piled in the truck and headed back to Abilene!  Before we went home, we stopped at Cotton Patch and had a yummy dinner with Cody's mom and dad for his b-day.  It was so good to see his parents...I haven't seen either of them since this summer...WHAT?!?!  How terrible is that?!?!?  This is when I realize that our lives can be way too busy sometimes.  After dinner, we headed to our house and had three very excited and wiggly doggies waiting for us!!!  It was so good to be home and just sit on the couch with our little family of five and watch some Sunday night football.  We have such amazing friends who have such amazing parents...and we are so very blessed to have each and everyone of them in our lives!!!  All in all...I would say that Codys' 30th birthday was a success!  He said that he had such a good time and it was awesome getting to spend such a big birthday with the people he loves the most.  I love you babe...and I can't wait to spend every single birthday with you!!!