is glad she's 25.

I am glad that I didn't post what I was intending to post two days before my birthday. I started to write another rant about how I felt my life wasn't working out the way I wanted it to, and thank goodness that it didn't work out the way I thought it would. I realize over and over that we can't expect life to turn out any certain way, but we should expect happiness because we're promised that life will be good if we do what is right. That's what builds our faith and leads to many happy surprises on the road of life. Last weekend included two of the biggest surprises of my entire life.

1. A surprise birthday party. It was incredible! My best friends put it together for me and I had absolutely no idea. First we went to go see Christmas Around the World, which was great, and afterwards we watched a movie. Then my friend Aleks disappeared. For some reason I was gullible enough to believe that she simply decided to go back to her apartment to help her roommate with some key problem and when we got there, the moment I stepped in the door, everyone shouted surprise! Wow. I honestly felt an incredible amount of love from my friends. I was so humbled by the fact that they would do that for me.


This is a picture that was taken at the party. Check out the sweet Victoria's Secret gift card they all got me. What else could a girl ask for?

The next surprise was even more incredible. 2. My other best friend, Erik (the one next to me on the couch) asked me to be his girlfriend. The details of the story are almost too perfect to blog about, but I'll indulge myself and post them here for you. It has been almost a year that we've known each other and about ten months since I decided that I liked him, a lot. I didn't find the courage to talk to him about the situation until October and at that point he told me he wasn't interested. This detail isn't meant to be embarrassing to me or him, but to show the importance of timing. I'll admit that I was crushed, but we continued to be friends, even better friends than before. I went about trying to move on in various ways (and never actually did it) , while he started thinking. I don't know the complete process that he went through to decide that he wanted to date me, but I know that it was incited in some way by our questioning friend Aleks who asked him something like "if you don't want to date her, what are you looking for?" He planned to talk to me on the weekend of my birthday, no better timing in my opinion, and I was floored. On the way to his former roommate's wedding reception he brought up the subject as we were driving. It was deja vu (in a good way) for me because he began in a very similar way to how I had initially talked to him; with no introduction he said, "So I need to talk to you about something..." and I haven't stopped giggling since.

This is Erik and I at Jonathan's wedding reception. Remind you of Prom? Yeah, we love it.

Life is surprising and wonderful. That's all I really wanted to say.