Hi friends! My birthday was last week, and I thought it would be fun to share a lifestyle post today with some of the stuff I got into to celebrate!
My birthday celebrations started a couple days early with a lunch date with my mom at one of my favorite local spots: Fiola Mare on the Georgetown waterfront.
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(Yep, wine with lunch – it was my birthday after all! YOLO…)
I always park a little ways away so I can walk along the water to get there and take in the DC views. I used to run down here all the time back in the day but not so much anymore and I miss it!
We had an absolutely delicious lunch and the weather was perfect to sit outside. I usually get spoiled by really gorgeous weather the week of my birthday and I don’t hate it!
To start, we shared some appetizers – here is my “whoa this is a lot of food!” face because everything was huge!
The salad was good but the oysters were the obvious winner here. +1 for the seaweed presentation, too! We also enjoyed some really good salty and buttery popovers – love those.
For my entree, I had the lobster ravioli which is always a favorite dish of mine to order. It was quite good! Again, +1 for the presentation – the tiny edible flowers were so pretty!
For dessert, they brought me a little slice of lemon cake with a candle (fun!), and my mom and I ordered the donuts to share – but they thought we ordered two so we got two of them!
It worked out as I brought some home for Riese and she was thrilled. They were SO good.
Thanks for the delicious and fun birthday lunch date, mom! It was such a treat.
Later in the week I had another special celebration – this time with Matt! We don’t really do much in terms of presents for each other for birthdays or holidays and instead do experiences/nice meals, which we both prefer!
Matt planned us a really fun date night, the highlight of which was taking the water taxi!
We had been talking for awhile about wanting to take the water taxi just for fun, and my birthday date was the perfect opportunity to go for it.
We took the water taxi from Old Town, Alexandria over to the DC Wharf for dinner. It was beautiful outside and such a lovely and relaxing 30 minute ride – we both loved it!
It was fun to be in the Wharf area as well as we don’t make it over there very often! It’s so lively – always tons going on and lots of great people watching.
Matt made us reservations for dinner at Del Mar (coincidentally owned by the same people as Fiola Mare, actually!), a Spanish tapas seafood place, and we got to sit outside and enjoy the views and sunset.
It was a really lovely, relaxing dinner. We got a whole slew of stuff and shared it all, which is always my favorite approach to meals at restaurants – I want to try as many flavors as possible!
Dinner was quite expensive (most places in the DC Wharf are) but it was worth it for a special outing. The only thing we got and didn’t love was a raw tuna appetizer that had kind of a weird sauce (unpictured). Everything else was great.
By the time we left dinner it was dark outside and the sliver of moon was gorgeous over the water.
We walked around a little bit debating whether we wanted to just take an Uber home or whether we should take the water taxi back to Old Town Alexandria and then Uber from there (which would take way longer), but we ended up deciding to go for the water taxi again and I was so glad we did!
I love being on the water at night – it was so pretty and peaceful.
Goodbye, Wharf! Until next time…
As for my actual birthday, I went to my usual 6 a.m. yoga class and requested a yummy breakfast when I got home so we could do a small celebration with the kids before they headed off to school and I left town around lunchtime for my weekend girl’s trip!
Matt made me a delicious veggie and feta omelette, strawberries, and one of my leftover lunch donuts with a candle in it so he and the kids could sing to me and I could blow out a candle. 🙂
Around lunchtime on my birthday (Thursday) I took the train up to Philadelphia for a really fun treat: a concert with one of my best friends from college and her husband! Two of our absolute favorite bands from senior year of college, Death Cab for Cutie and Postal Service, were doing a 20 year reunion tour and playing each of their 2003 albums in their entirety.
We already had plans to go to Cape May for our annual college girl’s trip starting on Friday, so when I found out about the concert in Philly (much closer to Cape May than DC), it made perfect sense to start the weekend fun a day early!
The concert was at the Mann Center in Philadelphia and we lucked out with great weather that evening, which was good since the concert was outdoors (and we had lawn tickets vs. seats under the overhang).
As for the concert, it was AMAZING – legit one of the best concerts I’ve been to. Not only did Ben Gibbard (the lead singer of both bands) sound amazing and have great energy, but it was also just super fun because my friend Turner and I still know every single word to every song on the albums from listening to them so often senior year.
It was so, so fun to get to hear it all live and to sing along and dance around. Awesome night!
And there concludes the birthday festivities! I felt very loved and spoiled by all the fun stuff I got to do last week. 🙂
I’ll be back next week with a recap of my weekend in Cape May with my college girlfriends! It was the best – we had a blast despite the fact that my luck with the weather ended and there was a tropical storm the whole time we were at the beach. Oh well – it was the company that mattered and we had so much fun despite the weather.
More to come!
