Nothing Special Birthday

Yesterday I celebrated my "nothing special" Birthday. But I must say there were many special things about it. My dear husband, my two teenage kids, my teenage niece, my little dog, my in-laws and a couple of close friends and their families were all with me. 22 loved ones in all. That means I love them and am loved back. That's pretty special.
We celebrated at our house and we made the food ourselves. I took care of a simple but delicious carrot/potato soup. Here is a picture that I took while I was still thinking of "let's reactivate my lovely, but stone cold blog".

Unfortunately that is my only subject-related image of the night. Reason being that I was up from after breakfast up to the start of the "party" at 5pm doing the shopping, cooking and preparing of: the soup, I started a salad that never got done, made Flammkuchen, started a hummus (that will also be a part of today's menu), prepared the starter of bacon wrapped dates and baked brownies (thanks to my teenage girls for helping with that). Phew. Yeah, some things didn't get done, but thanks to my guests for bringing along an avocado/mango salad, quiche lorraine, leche flan and cold dog's nose (translation of German dessert) will have to expound on that later... We had plenty to eat.
By the way, my dear husband almost missed out on helping set up the party, because he bought me a wonderful present that he had to assemble just before the guests came. Here it is.

In case it's not apparent what it is: A Strandkorb (in German literally a beach basket) is a polstered lounge chair that you can use when it's sunny but chilly ... The basket part is decorative, but helps also to keep the user warm. By the way, I live in a land locked city, but hey, it's still lovely and I can dream, right?