Once your children are old enough to truly appreciate celebrations, birthdays, and especially your own, become all about the child. While birthdays might just be another reminder that I may soon be plucking down major money for restylane, to my children my birthdays mean excitement- cupcakes, the zoo, a park, and dinner at a restaurant that serves chicken fingers. Essentially, in the past four years, birthdays have morphed from a day that was about me, to a day like any other, all about my kids.
This week I turned a very uneventful age- an age that I had never really contemplated before, in neither a good nor bad way. I am now an age that is utterly meaningless to me. I am in age limbo, trapped in a halfway point between youth and bi-weekly water aerobics. So naturally I felt little need to blow up the mylar balloons. Of course others in my family felt differently.
Since we were escaping the cold San Francisco fog and visiting my in-laws in Florida, my day began when my mother-in-law and my four-year-old daughter, Elana, bounded into my bedroom eager to hand me a carefully assembled tray with black tea, strawberries, bagels, and flowers picked fresh from the flowerpot on the balcony. Elana was soon followed by her younger sister, Maisy, and they immediately began arguing over who got to sit on my left side before commencing their amateur rhythmic gymnastics routine on the bed promptly spilling my hot tea.
Although I did enjoy a short shopping excursion and lunch away from the kiddos, I spent the majority of the day swimming in the pool, making birthday cakes out of play-doh, and comforting a constipated Maisy who eventually pooped in the pool (luckily she was wearing her reusable swim diaper).
Because the girls were still not adjusted to Florida time, we were not able to convince them of their exhaustion, more truthfully- our exhaustion, until well past ten PM. While Elana settled easily into her "nest" on the floor of my in-law's bedroom, for some reason Maisy loudly resisted retiring to her pak-n-play lodged in a spare bathroom. After numerous attempts to settle an irate toddler, I ended up spending the last forty-five minutes of my birthday lying on the cold tile floor next to the portable crib trying desperately not to make an audible move that might wake the babe drifting in and out of consciousness. Well, happy birthday to me!
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