Grumpy's 80th Birthday Weekend

I call this "Grumpy's 80th Birthday Weekend", because we spent all night Friday and all day Sunday celebrating Alastair's grandma's 80th birthday (and other birthdays, but I'll talk about that later). She is called "Grumpy" the same way that other young children call their grandmothers "Nana" or "Bubby". Why does this particular granny have this nickname? Nobody knows. I have mentioned Grumpy before in this blog, but I have to tell you that she is not grumpy. She is the antithesis of the adjective. You would only have to meet this vivacious woman one time to know that it makes sense for her to have three birthday parties to celebrate 80 years of life. 

On Friday (after going to my only full day of work all week), I went to her first party. 

Grumpy (more commonly known as Jane) hosted her first party at the Lion Hotel. If you read my blog regularly, then you read about when I went there for my work Christmas show (party) in December. There were about 175 people there, and every single lady in the room wore a fascinator. 

In the photo below is me, Anna and Ayzsa (also known as the girls who are dating/engaged to the Martin brothers). 

You may notice that Anna and I have identical fascinators. This was not planned. 

We all loved wearing our fascinators! They brought so much life into the party. 
Below is me and Al's really fun cousin Mig.

We stayed until they closed off the function room, which obviously means we had a great time! Al, his aunt Susie and I also put together a slide show to play in the background of the party. We scanned some very old photos. There were some exceptional ones, like this one:

Above is a photo of with Jane and her five children. From the left: Chris, Jane, Susie, Nick, Penny (Al's mom) and Tim. Penny and Tim are twins, and they just had their birthday the day before Jane! 

These days, Grumpy looks like this:

She's always smiling. Really, how do you get a name like Grumpy? Al's not even sure how they came up with that name. 

I'm not going to cover both celebrations (we went to two of the three parties) in one post, because it will be too long. I'll post another recap tomorrow. Before I go, though, I have to give some other birthday credits.

Since joining the Martin/Bungey family, March is an especially busy birthday month. Here are the March birthdays in the families:

• March 2: Jane/Grumpy
• March 3: Penny and Tim (Al's mom and uncle)
• March 4: My dad (JUST TURNED 30x2!!)
• March 6: My mom
• March 7: My grandma (maternal)
• My cousin also has a birthday March 11

There are a lot of birthdays squished into the beginning of the month, but I also think it's remarkable that both my mom and Penny have birthdays one day apart from their mothers. Al and his brother Nick also have birthdays that are one day apart. To me, those are crazy coincidences. 

Stay tuned for Grumpy-Palooza Part II!!!