Tomorrow, our brood is setting off on a little birthday road trip. This weekend is both my husband and my oldest heathen’s birthday…I know, it’s weird. In fact, my husband will be the first to tell you that, if I just could have held out four more hours, he and our son would have had the same birthday. I usually meet such statements with an overly dramatic sigh, followed by a harpy-like dissertation of just how fun it was to carry and birth a 10-pound Demon-Baby. Dude, that earns me one-up-man-ship for LIFE!

Given that my birthday, their birthdays, my grandmother’s birthday, various friends’ birthdays, Mother’s Day and an assortment of graduations and First Communions usually fall in May, we often refer to this month as “The Gauntlet.” May kills our expendable income faster than Christmas. I often feel guilty because either my husband or my son ends up with a last-minute, thrown together birthday celebration. Usually, it’s my husband who gets the short end of the stick, because I feel marginally less guilty for throwing him under the bus. However, he always puts the kids first and spoils them rotten, so he usually isn’t fazed by the lack of elaborate birthday celebrating.

But this year will be different! We decided to take a little family weekend road trip to Texas, and spend Saturday at an amusement park. We’ll get to sleep in a bed I don’t have to make, eat food I don’t have to cook and ride enough rides to turn my tender husband green, much to my gleeful amusement. Isn’t it awesome how well their birthday weekend benefits me?

Just kidding! I really wanted to do something fun for the both of them, and we haven’t done any fun family traveling in years. Come to think of it, I don’t think the kids have stayed in a hotel since they were toddlers, so this should be REALLY interesting.

Stay tuned for pictures, mayhem and hijinks!