As an early birthday celebration I took Steve Rogers out for a glass of wine – pinot & cab – and some live jazz at a cozy little wine bar in downtown Rochester. I snuck in some dollar store colored markers – orange and purple – and we doodled on a blank sheet of notebook paper. Mostly vi hart doodles and pigpen code. I could feel the sophisticated people who like to go out for a glass of wine and listen to live jazz judging us, silently, but the waiter with the bright pink hair and embroidered waistcoat thought it was cool. I anticipate that restaurant doodling shall be in vogue in no time at all.

Then we split some Tiramisu and the jazz guitar stopped playing.

He knew this was part of the plan. But then we hit Strasburg Planetarium for some Laser Beyoncé, which he did not know was part of the plan and didn’t find out about until we were standing in line for tickets – although you should have seen his face light up when we turned into the Rochester Museum and Science Center parking lot. He was delighted. We leaned the seats back and stared up at the lights dancing on the ceiling throughout about a dozen songs and it was beautiful. It was an aestheically pleasing light display which made full use of the planetarium’s impressive projection technology, creatively synchronized to some classic tracks from the queen B. Tickets were more than affordable. Support your local science museum.

It was a lovely collection of songs, and they weren’t too loud. We took a moment to enjoy the display cases outside the dome, too. I wish there’d been more time to read and fully appreciate everything that was there.

We can always go back.

Yesterday I told him we were going out on Saturday evening so he should probably get all clean and spiffy and get his homework done in time. So he did.

He smiled a lot this evening and told me he hasn’t had a birthday celebration this nice in a long time.

If he’s going to be older than dirt then he might as well enjoy all this time.