Festival of birthday

Last week (ANZAC day) was my birthday! 

We had Thursday and Friday off work, so I managed to stretch the birthday celebrations over a full 6 days (starting with morning tea at work on Tuesday) - a festival of birthday!

Wednesday we headed up to Sydney and had a gorgeous lunch at Centennial Park, then dinner at I'm Angus in Darling Harbour - the staff are amazing, as are the onion rings! And check out the view =)

There's a Lindt chocolate store just around the corner, and even though we were stuffed full of delicious onion rings we couldn't resist popping in!

My daggy iPhone pic doesn't really do it justice, but everything was gift wrapped and shiny and colourful and pretty! I want ribbons on the wall just like those ones there!

We stayed at the Menzies, which was really beautiful. It is right opposite Wynyard, in the city and our window looked out onto the station, so I was expecting a bit of street noise on Thursday morning but it was so lovely and quiet! We would definitely stay there again!

Breakfast was at Green Bean Espresso, just next door to the hotel. The Mediterranean breakfast was delicious, and enormous! (we didn't eat for the rest of the day!)

A quick trip to Kinokuniya (as if I could visit Sydney without popping in there!) and we were on the bus home again.

There were exciting presents (my Mum has the best taste in fabric!)

On Friday I went out with a friend for morning tea - we went to Ricardo's in Jamison.

Check out this cake! It is apple cheesecake and was really AMAZING! You can see the apple/cinnamon inside, there was also a little pocket of biscuit crumbs. Incredible - how do they do it?!

Saturday there would two exciting deliveries....

One from my local sewing shop!

(It's not out of the box yet! I was too busy over the weekend to sit down and look at it properly, so I'm saving it for later in the week!)

And our IKEA billy bookcases arrived!

I ordered them through Bring It Home - I would totally recommend using them. They were super professional, and the delivery charge for my 3 bookcases plus a cd tower was only $130 - very reasonable!

We managed to get everything put together on Saturday arvo (and not an allen key in sight!) - filling them is still a work in progress, but here's how they're looking so far...

I'm really loving them!

Of course no birthday celebration is complete around here without lots of kitty hugs and smooches - these guys were excited to have us home (mostly because they haven't figured out how to turn the heater on for themselves yet, I think!)

Jinx was very helpful when it came to reorganising the books.

Max just mostly looked confused!

To cap off a lovely few days, yesterday was Brown Owls!

Which meant not only catching up with my lovely friends but also an excuse to bake brownies and an opportunity to get some baby snuggles.

Perfect closer on the festival of birthday, I think! xo