Birthdays this, birthdays that, more birthday stuff blah, blah, blah. Thought you were done hearing about the 20 ways Jason and I celebrated our birthdays eh? Well, looks like this old girl’s got one more in her yet.

My family, like Jason’s, has no shortage of July birthdays. (I think the birthday quota for July has officially been met so could you people please have a few kids during different months just to shake things up a bit?) As they have in the past, this year my family held an ultimate July birthday extravaganza collectively for me, Jason, my sister Tonya, and her husband Ryan. This party went down at my parents’ house last week and involved: chile rellenos, freeze tag, cake, pant wettings, dog fights, beans, cello serenades, blanket forts, cowboy hats, and poetry readings. In other words, it was just a normal night for our crazy crew.

My mom made one of my favorites, chile rellenos, for our dinner along with her typical assortment of way more food than a zoo full of stoned monkeys could consume. Beans were a part of this great feast too of course because, no matter what the meal occasion, with my family there is always room for beans.

We ate in the backyard, as is our custom during the summertime. It was an agreeable evening for lounging in the shade while enjoying some tasty grub but before our plates had been emptied the usual mayhem began. Between my mom’s and brother’s dogs streaking around people’s legs as they wrestled each other’s ears and our niece Isabelle having an unplanned bladder evacuation, even the dull moments weren’t dull. Following dinner the birthday squad blew out their candles, with the help of a number of transfixed children, and opened what seemed like a never-ending pile of presents. Once all that normal birthday stuff was out of the way a group of the youngins halted their picnic table blanket fort construction to enlist me and Jason in a series of tag games that required some pretty fancy dog poo dodging skills on our part while our nephew Benson brought out his cello and recited a few well-rehearsed pieces to the other adults.

Ah yes, the melodious sound of screaming kids harmonized by the mellow vibrations of the cello and the sharp accents of yapping dogs. It was like a birthday symphony commissioned by the primal god Chaos. But that’s how family is supposed to be, right? A messy jumbled filling smothered in a shell of love?

All this merriment and bedlam marked the conclusion of our birthday festivities and, yes, I promise that is the end of the birthday party posts, at least until next July when a whole lot of birthday jiving and mayhem will be going on once again.

A crackling campfire brings to mind crisp mountain air, smelly pines, and sizzling wieners. Yes, summer isn’t summer until you’ve spent some time burning marshmallows around a campfire. Sadly, Jason and I have not made it to the mountains for any camping or roasting yet this season. Although we plan on remedying that insufficiency soon, last week instead of going to the campfire we brought the campfire to us.

Jason’s family is peopled with July birthdayers, too many for individual recognition I’m afraid, so this year their specialness was celebrated in bulk. In way of birthday festivities we ate a yummy Dutch oven meal and then took the party to the pit.

Keith and Sue own a rather large plot of land and they’ve added a fire pit to its topography. While this pit doesn’t have the accompanying scenic splendor you’ll find when lighting a glow on any of Utah’s majestic peaks, it does provide more than enough smoke and flames to give you that signature mountaintop reek.

That evening our group formed a large circle around those flaming logs and ineffectively played musical chairs with the blaze’s persistent billows until the scorched mallows and smoke inhalation left us a little buzzed. You always suspected that most of the Sabins were headed for a fiery inferno, right?

I have to admit that those suburban fire rings are pretty snazzy. You can just pop into the backyard with your bag of marshmallows, roasting stick, and camp chair and voila! You’ve got yourself an instant nearly-authentic campfire experience right down to the stinky hair.

It was a nice and odorous way to celebrate our bunch of July birthdays. Who says that pits have to be full of despair?