Twenty-Eight, Ain't so Bad

I celebrated my 28th year of life on August 24. I guess over this past year I have come to the conclusion that getting older isn't really that bad. In fact it's a blessing. Celebrating a birthday means I have been blessed with another year of life. I am healthy, have an awesome family, and have many other countless blessings that fill my life each day. Really, I can't complain, even if I am a year older.
On my birthday we didn't do much, except I didn't have to cook. Which is always awesome, but was especially awesome on my special day. Kyle is on the South Beach Diet which requires a lot of outside the box thinking for yummy meals and it is 3 smaller meals and two snacks throughout the day. The first two weeks he lost about 15lbs. It was rough, but I think we are going to stick with it. He would like to switch back over to calorie counting which we have had success with in the past as well. We just have a hard time getting back on track if we have one off day. Sorry, back to birthday talk.... he ordered us pizza on my birthday and he just watched us eat it and ate something much more healthy (poor guy).
Kyle's work gets free tickets to all sorts of things. I saw they had tickets to a dinner cruise on the 25th. I said I thought that was something we could do for my birthday. He agreed and got us signed up. A bit later (when it was to late to back out) they informed us it was up in Bellingham, 3 hours away. YUCK. Luckily they drove us and it didn't end up being that bad of a ride. Kaytee our sitter stayed home with the kids, so it was a nice evening just the two of us and 8 others on the van, and about 100 others on the boat. It was put on by Soldier's Angels. If  you are ever looking for an organization to help support the troops, this is an awesome one! The cruise was up in Bellingham Bay. We were a little disappointed in the food, it was more appetizer type dishes, but the scenery made up for the lack of what I would consider dinner cruise food.
For my birthday Kyle bought me a new camera. It is a the Nixon D5100 Digital SLR. I don't want to be a professional, or even try to look like a professional I just wanted a nice camera to take pictures of my family and our travels with. Part of the deal with the camera is that I find a class to take to learn more about photography and how to properly use it. We have had fun playing around with it. It is nice to be able to take quality pictures. He always gets me way nicer things than I expect, and this far exceeded what I wanted, but I love it!
So here are some pictures from the camera on our first outing with it our dinner cruise.
This isn't our boat...we managed to get a picture of everything but the boat we were on...

 I am really overexposed, but its a good picture of me, so I had to share it.

 The water was full of sailboats. They were beautiful.

 We came across this crew team practicing.

 It was a perfect evening.

 We met Joe Moser on our cruise. He is an airman, World War II veteran and Nazi concentration camp survivor. Click HERE to read more about him if you are interested. 

 The sunset was pretty beautiful but it got really chilly towards the end of the evening.