Difficult birthday

It's definitely not the ideal way to spend a birthday, but I was thrilled to see several of my longtime friends and so many relatives. This is me and my cousin, Kay. We were saying at Tyler's wedding last year that we needed to get a picture of us together when we'd be 50 and this was as close as we could get. I'm 51 today and she's 50 till July 31.

Here I am with Darla and Ann. Darla and I have been friends since we were 3 years old, going to Sunday School together and besties since middle school. She was my maid of honor. Ann and I have been friends since high school and roomed together two years at ISU. She was in my wedding too. It was so good to see them both. Old friends are the best.

This is me and Cindy with Kay and her sisters. We have three other girl cousins on mom's side of the family but they weren't at the luncheon, or had left before I pulled out the camera.

Leave it to L to put a goofy filter on the picture of me with Cindy. I hope she still has the original. She was my photographer for the day. B was still tired from his trip and nodded off at the table before E told him to go lie down on a church pew that was in the basement.

Pretty flowers from my Aunt Nora and her family, Darla and her mom ...

and from Andy's family.

That afternoon B went back to sleep at the hotel but the girls wanted something to do so we took a little trip to the cemetery (after a shopping trip to Rural King and dinner at the Dairy Queen). We didn't have time to look around this morning and it's a pretty interesting place. The cemetery is located at the end of my grandparents' farm and has a lot of my family buried there, going back to my great-grandparents and I wanted to show the kids the tombstones. Some of the newer tombstones are really works of art with farm scenes etched into them. It was interesting for me to look around and see names of families I grew up with.

My uncle's, grandparents' and parents' tombstones are together. I apparently have two plots there which, I assume, are in that same area. Of course, I had to ask the funeral director Saturday how they handle a long-distance burial and he said the body is driven where it needs to go and he's been to Chicago a few times, Kentucky, etc. Pretty normal process. Good to know.