Joy To My World

You know what emotion adults don't experience enough?  Joy.  Oh, we have joy on the days we are married and we are almost crushed by joy on the days our children are born, but day to day joy is hard to maintain in our busy lives.  

You put the dishes away? Hooray! Let's jump for joy!

Dogs feel joy every day.  Heck, they feel joy every ten minutes.  Owner comes home? Joy.  Food in the bowl?  Joy.  Door opened to go outside?  Joy.  What?!  A walk?!?!?  Uncontained joy making it hard to get a leash on due to excessive howling, spinning and merriment.  Well, from Bailey anyway.  Grommit (aka Eeyore) sits sullenly waiting to see if she will be leashed up too.

I am incredibly fortunate that I share my house with a nine year old boy who not only finds joy every day, but infects the rest of us with it.  Life has not been kind to my son and he has had a hard time of it since the day he was born.   Hernia repair and double eye surgery all before age two.  Delayed development due to the fact he couldn't see kept him a baby for a long time but my gosh he was a happy, happy baby.  It took him forever to reach milestones, but along the way, he smiled with his beautiful smile and laughed with a laugh that would just tickle your soul.  He brought us joy before he even brought us words.

School is hard, hard, hard for my boy and while it wears me down for him, he loves to go.  He feels he is very popular and there are cute girls to impress and off he goes each day with his Pokemons tucked under his arm and a smile on his face.  We tell each other our highs and lows each night at dinner and while he has many highs about the day, he rarely has a low.  We often say that God wrapped him in Teflon and the things that would crush the rest of us seem to bounce right off of him. His Teflon does occasionally get pierced and his sadness tears holes in my heart, but he recovers much quicker than I do and he is back to being exuberant and ready to keep going.

Sometimes his joy is misplaced and it is a struggle to get him to see what needs to be done.  He and I have been at loggerheads about homework all year.  "I did that last week" he will say and think he is done.  I will remind him he has to do it every week.  He will say "nuh-uh", and on and on until one of us is ready to pull her hair out.  He also drives his sisters crazy with his non-stop happiness and they either snap at him or let it beat them down and join him.  (I prefer the latter)  The boy with horrific vision who cannot catch a ball to save his life will tell you he is going to play for the NFL when he grows up.  Ouch says my heart.  He doesn't even play flag football because his foray into basketball one season left Bill and I crushed and depleted on the sidelines.  However, if you ask him about it, he was awesome.  And given that he can punt a football 35 yards easy, maybe he will play for the NFL.

We recently put up our Christmas decorations and he was a large help (hee hee) getting the tree up and the lights and decorations on.  Our kids have always liked to lay under the tree and look up at it and no sooner were they done decorating that he was off and running for blankets.  I am sure my daughter feels herself too old and cool to be hanging out under the tree, but she got caught up in his enthusiasm and was not only under there, but reading to him as well.  Enter Mom joy there.  Whose turn is it for the Advent calendar? He knows and informs me first thing every morning.  The boy I have to remind to put socks on each day is barrelling down the stairs and turning the tree lights on every day.  He also rushes in after school and turns them on then.  He is so excited about Christmas and about the tree and its lights, I find that I am happy because he is happy.  One morning this week we had extra time and I laid under the Christmas tree with him and we talked about the day and Pokemon and some video game and I tell you, it really lent an air of peace about my day.  Normally I tune that video game talk out, but I let him run on and on and it wasn't as painful there under the tree.

Best seat in the house.

I am sure this is probably his last year for believing in Santa and I am soaking it up.  He was very concerned wondering if Santa would still come given his bad behavior as of late.  We assured him that continued good behavior would go a long way for him and it was not too late to get off the naughty list.  He seems a little wary but has chosen to believe us.  Worry replaced with joy just a few hours later.  

We are blessed that he is joyful all year round, but I tell you, his joy is almost palpable this time of year.  The trees, the lights, the chocolate and sweets starting to pile up and the nervousness of Santa coming take his joy and turn it into pure magic.  He is so excited about the tree lights, I become excited about the tree lights.  He is laughing about something ridiculous and there is his sister laughing with him.  Dad is not feeling well but is still so caught up in listening to what he has to say because his eyes are shining and he can't get the words out fast enough.  Oh and Christmas morning!  He will not be the first one up, but he will be up in an instant when he hears his sister and will spring from the bed, smile on, feet hitting the floor and running.  He will be laughing and oohing and touching and even before he starts opening, he will be shaking.  All that joy, all that happiness, all that intensity too much to keep inside and he will shake all through opening his presents.  And we will laugh at first and then watch him some more and Bill and I will smile and feel our  hearts grow three sizes and think it is a very merry Christmas indeed. 

Let's Play Pretend

Have you seen this?  This was and will be the actual weather in Austin for last weekend and this week.  High of 38?!?  That is crazy talk and I love it!  High of 56 on Thanksgiving?  That means the oven can be on all day and no one is sweating and wearing shorts.  That is happiness, pure and simple happiness.

Austin, I am not mocking you because I have lived here long enough to go "BRRRR" when faced with anything below 50.  My first winter here I ran around without a coat on because I thought it was so warm and took on an ice storm like it was nothing. The hotel I worked at had me drive two ladies down the tollroad in Dallas through said ice storm to their meeting.  Hotel insurance wouldn't cover their hotel vans going out, but it was perfectly fine for the Buffalo girl to take guests out in her crappy car.  They gave me a giant cookie when I got back and I thought it a perfectly reasonable exchange.   I will admit that I do giggle a little at how Texas plays winter.  The weather people with their somber voices and dramatic music and lead-ins of "Winter 2013".  Protect your plants!  Go wrap your pipes!  Bring the dogs in!  Please, dogs in my neighborhood are treated as good if not better than the kids, so no worries there.  There is the poor young newscaster right out of college doing the live reports bundled up in a puffy, down,  3/4 length coat, a Russian fur hat and scarf up under her nose.  The temperature?  50.  Then the weather man with his dire intonations of possible freezing precipitation, showing us video of snow in counties so far west and north, I think they must be in New Mexico.  My poor Texas children go to bed with visions of snowflakes dancing in their head.  The boy I can't pull out of bed in the morning is running down the stairs at 6:30am on a day off to see if it snowed.

I have seen some great things this week as we all hunker down and play winter.  Kids at school are either dressed to summit Everest or are wearing shorts and pretending they are not cold even as their legs turns pink.  The number of trees decorated along 360 has increased as cooler weather leads us into thinking Christmas. The environmentalist in me cringes with these adorned trees, but the bored commuter in me loves them.

not the best shot, but the only one where I was stuck in traffic.

Another fun thing I saw on my commute this week was a man not only selling firewood on the side of the road but chopping it as well.  Go Paul Bunyan! Is that great marketing or what?!?  We don't have an actual wood burning fireplace and I still wanted to stop and buy logs. (and no, it was not a shirtless young man chopping. He was old and layered up like he was wearing every shirt he owned)

The stores already crowded with the pre-Thanksgiving rush are now inundated with those afraid of being iced in without enough bread or milk or God help us, Deep Eddy Pink Grapefruit vodka.  We can do without a lot for a few days but not that vodka.

I know that there are many of you who are tired of the cold weather already (CG), but I say keep it coming!  We had the most relaxing weekend ever last weekend because we were hunkered down playing winter.  We didn't go anywhere, we didn't do much, we napped, we played some board games and even the kids were content.  The boy laughed so hard playing Apples to Apples that he turned red and couldn't breathe and I soaked up his exuberance and joy.   The oven and stove were on all day and it was still pleasant in the house.  A weekend of comfy pants and sweatshirts, of low expectations and contentment.  I had that rested Thanksgiving feeling a full five days before Thanksgiving!

When my kids tell me they are cold, I absolutely love to tell them "put a sweater on."  My mother must have intoned this ten times a day for 20 years between October and April each year and it gives me great happiness to hear her words come out of my mouth.  Layer up.  Dress for the weather.  Even Bill has been spotted dressing for the weather.  

the message makes me sigh, but the hoodie makes me smile.

I love this playing winter. I say playing because it is cold but we don't have to shovel our way out of the house or change the tires on our cars for snow.  We are not snowed in, iced in or otherwise truly inconvenienced.  We can still get to the store, the bank and our jobs.  I like to wear sweaters to work and not sweat.  I like the way a hot cup of coffee feels in hands that are actually a little cold.  I like that the kids and dogs all want to sit on the same couch and as close to each other as possible.  I do hope it snows at some point this year.  We have been years without snow and it is time for a light dusting to shut down the city.  My kids need to play outside and build a dirty snowman and lay down some snow angels and beam each other with snowballs.  Heck, forget the kids, I need to do that! We could play outside until our noses run and turn red and our wet hands in our cheap gloves go numb and tingle.  We'll stomp the snow off of our feet as we make it inside and gladly hold a cup of something steaming hot in our hands.  We'll sit on the couch together and watch the news to see if there will be more snow and watch the video footage where the camera sets up at the bottom of a hill and watches cars slide down it and take bets on whether they will slide, stop or stop and slide.  We will play games and read books and watch too much TV and be lazy.

Really, the only thing missing from this current cold spell is that silence that comes from a snowfall at night.  The world becomes muffled under a soft blanket of white and you can hear everything around you and nothing at all at the same time.  It is a quiet not heard in our days of rushing and beeping and buzzing and frenzied activities and one I think would do us all a world of good.    We will slow the world down for a day and savor it because it is fleeting.  It will be here and gone and we will be back to tank tops and flip flops in an eye blink.  So don't hate it Austin, embrace it!

It All Comes Down to Butter

Last summer, I did something that inadvertently changed my life.  I brought home an audio book of Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”.  Bill drives two hours each way to get to his office and I thought this would be some interesting listening and act as a pleasant diversion for a few days.  Instead, it made him vegan.  Vegan, as in hold the eggs, no cheese for me, vegan. I have to say that when he first told me he was going to be vegan, I did not think it would last.    Two months in, I changed to hoping it wouldn’t last.  Now he is one year and five months in and I am afraid it is going to last.

I miss my husband cooking with eggs and cheese.  The man makes a blue cheese mac and cheese that will not only stop your heart, it will take your breath away; it is that good.  I swear it was just a few years ago I had to ask him to stop cooking everything with a roux; my wiggly thighs couldn’t take any more buttery beginnings.  We didn’t eat a lot of meat before this, but I find now that because there is never meat in the house, it is all I want to order when we are out.  I used to be very discerning about the meat I ate.  Now I just eat meat.

In an effort to make the most of my time, when I bake, I bake vegan so that both the kids and Bill have something sweet.  I use veggie butter in place of butter, flax seed and water in place of eggs.  When I eat what I have baked, my taste buds scream “WHERE IS THE BUTTER?!?”  “WHY HAVE YOU RUINED CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIES?!?!”  Bill insists that they taste great but the man is living on soy and grains and is therefore taste bud compromised.  The kids eat it, but there is a haunted look around their eyes.  

We do eat well and very healthfully.  We tease each other about our meal choices.  For example, if Bill is in a bad mood or says he is tired, I will tell him to eat some meat.  Or because I am always tired, he will say it is because I am loaded down with animal proteins.  Ha ha, we laugh and tease.  Until today.  Today he posted ridiculous menu items he said sounded great for Thanksgiving.  It was from something called a Vegan Guide to a Turkey-less Thanksgiving.  Blasphemy!  You can take away my blue cheese mac and cheese, but you cannot substitute a Lentil Mushroom Loaf for my turkey Bill McMahon.  You cannot.

Thanksgiving is about butter and gravy and turkey and pie.  It is not Veggie Tofu Pot Pie or Tofurkey.  I will not “make the vegetable the star of the show” as your recent post declares.  I will stick that vegetable on the side and drown it in butter, gravy or cream of mushroom soup as the Pilgrims intended.  I want whipping cream in my mashed potatoes and I want to use the leftover whipped cream from the pies in my morning coffee.  I want the first scoop of mashed potatoes with the swimming pool of butter on top.  I definitely do not want to use coconut milk as a substitute for anything as far as the pies go.  No I do not.  I want the house to smell like cooking turkey all day long and into the night.  Thanksgiving is not grains and veggies and health because calories do not count on Thanksgiving.  We eat until we are so full we have to lie down and we blame it on tryptophan – not the 4000 calorie dinner we just ate.  We wake up from a little nap and because our stomachs have lost a bit of their distended bloat, we start on dessert.  And who can eat just one piece of pie?  Later at night, our stomachs empty from being stretched out all day; it is time for a turkey and stuffing sandwich.  (Bread on bread?  What, you say?  Try it, you can thank me later.)  This is Thanksgiving.  I feel like Charlie Brown being handed pretzels and popcorn when you talk about anemic vegetables and soy pressed products instead.

Sigh. It is apparent that we will need to sit down and work out what is non-negotiable so that we can both have a happy holiday.  My list is as follows: TURKEY, gravy, sausage stuffing, real whipped cream and genuine, from the cow, butter on everything.  I don’t know what Bill will put as his non-negotiable but I bet falafel is part of it.  I am not sure the chick pea really has a right to be at Thanksgiving.  However, because I am thankful for my husband and thankful for the right to eat my weight in mashed potatoes, if I get my list, he can have his too.  

Stop Rushing Me!

Enough America.  Enough of your propaganda.  Enough of your ads, your music in the background, your red cups of coffee extolling a season that is not yet here.  Enough.

It is early November.  The weather finally feels like fall.  Halloween is past, but so recently that kids still have their trick-or-treat candy left.  There are still three and a half weeks until Thanksgiving and, believe it or not, 7.5 weeks until Christmas.  You would never know this based on the ads on TV, the circulars in the paper and the bombardment of Christmas in every store.  I don't want to see stores bedecked in red and green. My eyes are still happy with autumnal reds, oranges and yellows.  I know Thanksgiving isn't a big money maker, but do we have to go right from Halloween to Christmas?  It is like reading the first three chapters of a book, skipping the middle and then diving into the final chapter.  Total rip-off.

I was surprised to receive the big toy book from Target before Halloween.  That got tossed without even paging through it because IT IS TOO SOON to start thinking about Christmas.  And yes, I tossed it complete with coupons and $5 gift card inside because you have to use them before Thanksgiving.  I was saddened to see that Starbucks broke out their holiday red cups on November 1st.  Too soon Starbucks, too soon.  Red cups December 1st?  Yes, perfect.  Let's all dream of peppermint mochas, playing Santa and good will towards men.  Red cups on November 1st?  Pressure.  It is not festive and merry when you force it too soon.  We will all be sick of the red before St. Nicholas Day.  (December 6th for those of you who did not grow up in the North).

Bah.  Humbug.

I am not going to buy into the hype.  I am going to eat my kids' candy and I am not going to skip over the next three weeks of thinking about Thanksgiving.  I am going to look forward to a long, long weekend filled with amazing food and time spent together as a family.  We will eat with abandon and wear our comfy pants all day long.  No nice clothes and good manners (except for Bill), just time together, movies, hanging out and relaxing.  Time to reflect, time to give thanks, time to just stop grinding it out each day and time to just breathe.  One year, thanks to my worldly cousin, we ended up having a guest here from another country who had never had Thanksgiving dinner before.  My kids got to explain the history of Thanksgiving (minus the genocide that followed) and he got to eat a Bill McMahon turkey dinner.  It was a beautiful, beautiful, rewarding, soul-enriching day.  Why are we as a nation trying to fast forward through all this?

Last year I got caught up in the hype.  I felt that I had to buy this at this store or this over here or this right now, but financially I couldn't jump fully into my seasonal crazy and that made me stressed.  I was sure Christmas would be ruined and I wouldn't get what we needed.  But let me tell you, Bill and I took a day the week before Christmas and got everything we needed, and cheap!  Forget Black Friday!  Try the mall the week before Christmas - they are giving things away!  The best part was that we took an entire day and we spent it together.  We had coffee and talked, we went to the mall and survived, we thought about our kids and how big they had gotten.  We wondered if William would still shake when he opened his presents.  (He did, but not as much as we hoped.)  It was a calm, wonderful day in the middle of a busy, harried week and I can't wait to do it again.

So please don't let them fool you.  Don't let them take away the actual beauty of Thanksgiving by treating it like it doesn't matter.  It does matter!  Don't ruin the magic of Christmas by buying into it too soon.  Christmas is magical because it only takes place for a short while, not because it is readily available November 1st.  There will be plenty of stuff available in December and leftover stuff haunting the shelves still in January.  Close your eyes to the commercials and skip over the ads in the paper.  Look at the weather and the calendar to decide which holiday is really next.  

I wish I could say I would boycott Starbucks and their red cups for the next month, but that would be silly.  I think I will bring a reusable cup when I go as to not be angered and which I should do anyway.  December 1st, however,  I will take their red cup and I will smile and I will feel the magic of a true Christmas season beginning to sparkle.

A Dull Roar

First of all, I have to say that my library is never a quiet place because, well, I work there. I never hesitate to throw back my head and laugh out loud if moved to do so and luckily for me, my librarian does too.  Secondly, we have at least 150-200 kids in here every morning before the bell rings.  They are waiting at the door for us as early as 7:30 and they trickle in when we open at 8:00 and completely engulf us by 8:45.  Some are checking out books, others are frantically finishing work, most are printing and the rest are here to check in with friends and TALK VERY LOUDLY until the bell rings.  We have classes in and out and moving through here continuously creating movement and flow of the noise.  We also have kids in here during their lunch period.  We used to let them eat in here but because they are kids and therefore slobs, that stopped by the end of the first marking period.  We can still get quite the crowd in here and the cacophony created is amazing.  The noise just surrounds you, it envelops you, it swarms over and under and through you and you get lost in a mindless buzz invading your brain.  And then, every now and then, it goes quiet.  You can hear the scratch of a pen over paper or the printer slowly grinding up for the next page. Or even better, snatches of whispered conversations from the back.  “….I told her I would….”, “He better not cuz…..”.   

A lot of the noise I hear is swearing.  Teenage swearing which is overdone and therefore ineffective for the most part.  I guess as an adult we learn to use it for emphasis or in my case, with beer.   The potty-est mouths of all come from our table of boys playing grown up Pokémon.  Magic? Magik?  However it is spelled, it brings out the longshoremen in these kids.  I actually get to tell people to watch their mouths.   If that isn’t irony, I am not sure what is.

Where can I get one of these?!

Oh, the technology!  Everyone is beeping and buzzing and tweeting and ringing.  They are listening to music so loudly I can hear it when they pass.  Forget Spanish, these kids need to learn ASL because none of them are going to be able to hear after age 40.

When caught in the tornado of noise and movement, conversations get started and end abruptly.  Sometimes we remember to pick the thread back up and continue with it, sometimes we forget.  Today’s involved a mom who came in and asked that we stop checking books out to her son, he is reading too much.  I got interrupted at that point and left thinking what a mean mom she was but apparently he is reading rather than doing any of his homework, so I am glad I picked that conversation thread back up before I started openly condemning her.  We also have coffee in our break room and teachers stream back and forth throughout the day and deposit words of stress or wisdom or “Wait til you hear this!” This definitely adds to the noise and fragmented conversations throughout the day.

This is a different environment from the very quiet library I worked in before and it took me some time to get used to the buzz, the business, the constant movement.  I told a mom today that it probably took me two weeks to stop getting annoyed at being interrupted constantly to realize that those interruptions were really the bulk of my job.    Now those interruptions have names and I know what classes they are taking, what they are reading, if they are having a good day or a bad day.   I get to encourage and admonish from a place called concerned adult rather than mom, and it is fun.  They tell me about their weekends and their classes and their lives and I love it.  One of my interruption's mom grew up in Buffalo!  We now bond over Weber's mustard and Bison chip dip.  I end up taking some of their heartache on, I just can’t help it.  These are good kids and they remind me that being a teenager is hard work in addition to being self-centered and self-absorbed.  And loud.  Really, really loud.

I think that the days of quiet libraries are definitely coming to an end. Hushing librarians and quiet study turning into urban legends.  I sometimes wish it wasn't always so loud, but given the choice over shushed and sterile or dynamic and vibrant, well, bring on da noise! 

Here's a Story...

You know what is a mixed bag?  Step-parenting: all the responsibilities of a parent and none of the control.  I have been doing this gig now for thirteen years and I am still struggling. There are times when I am awesome: cookies for her class, rides to wherever she needs to go, forgotten items run up to school to save the day.  There are also times when, quite frankly, I suck:  not ready for the level of parenting her age requires, being so frustrated by her lack of planning I am angry at her all week or just not wanting to drive her somewhere she needs to go.

 I met Maizy when she was just about to turn three.  She was small, vivacious, and verbose and liked having her Dad to herself.  She will turn sixteen, God help us, this weekend and I find myself thinking of the first birthday I shared with her.  On that third birthday, Bill and I took her to Chuck E. Cheese to celebrate.  I had no idea what I was in for as far as lights, noise, cracked out kids and primary colors.  Maizy and I bonded as we watched a girl pee right next to the ball pit, shake her leg and go back in.  We were united in horror.  We were also united in sobbing as we left: Maizy because she didn’t want to go and me because it was the most horrible place I had ever been to, I never wanted to go again and this meant I hated kids and never wanted to be a parent but loved this man who had a kid and wahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  Bill wisely put us both to bed when we got home and I was pregnant six months later and the whole thing was a moot point. 

Maizy has spent most of her growing up spending one week at her mom’s and the next week at our house.  When people ask how that works, I tell them that it is hard work to share a child.  Think about it, you have two people who had a relationship and had a child, but the relationship did not work for various reasons and now they are confronted with those reasons again and again as they work to raise a child.  Good times.  It is hard work for the kid who is coming back and it is hard work for the kids are there the whole time to adjust.  It is hard work for the parent who is missing her and it is hard work for the parent who is trying to do everything for her the week she is there.  When she was little, she used to come back and touch everything she had left behind as if to say “I’m back”.  Now that she is older, she takes everything with her each week back and forth.  I have tried to talk her into keeping boring things like socks at each house, but even those get shuttled back and forth.  She wrote a story for English once on how she liked having two houses to be at and how she liked the different dynamics of each. However, she has recently told us that she finds it easier to lie when writing anything autobiographical.   Hard work, indeed.

Hard shoes and hair to fill

I wish I had friends who were also stepparents – we could commiserate and help each other through the sticky spots and understand truly what the other was going through.  I don’t though. I know very few real life stepparents.  I still think Carol Brady and Joseph when I think stepparents and that is intimidating.  Carol Brady?  She took on all those boys and never batted an eye, just smiled and drank coffee with Alice in the kitchen.  Joseph?  He raises the human form of God willingly and obediently.  And I make cookies for bake sales.  I remember when Maizy first played soccer and Bill was coaching and I introduced myself to the other moms as her stepmom; they almost recoiled.  Feeling slighted, I thought, just wait.  Law of averages, half of you will be divorced in five years and dealing with your own stepparent situations.  Ha!  I am not always a nice person.

I want Maizy to know I think she is an amazing young woman.  She is independent and smart and so funny.  Like laugh out loud funny.  I want her to know that I think her situation stinks even when I am being indifferent to it.  I want her to know that saying things she doesn’t want to hear is not yelling.  I want her to know she is a part of our family even when she is at her mom’s.  I want to tell her to be as nice to her sister as she is to her brother because when she is not it makes me want to be mean to her.  I want her to know and appreciate how much her Dad has done for her and because of her.  Basically, I want her to know exactly what is in my head and heart and agree with it and think I am fantastic.  However, that will probably not happen until she has a child of her own so until then, if she just knows that I love her and mean well, even if I am “yelling” all the time, that will have to do.

Happy, Happy, Happy

You know, it is not often in life that you get exactly what you want.  Especially after you have kids and your life and your wants and needs come second.  However, yesterday, my 40th birthday was spent and celebrated and lived exactly they way I wanted.

It actually started before my birthday as my new co-workers brought me presents and cake and began my birthday celebration early.  In the two months we have worked together, I have shared a lot with these women, probably over shared, and every day that I work with them and laugh with them and live my life along side them, I see so clearly why all those job interviews before were a bust.  This perfect job was not ready for me yet. 

I woke up feeling no older or different that I had going to bed at age 39.  That was a good start, right?  I wanted to start my day with a hard kettlebell workout and I got it.  I alternately felt young, strong and invincible and then old, feeble and decrepit.  My legs and lungs burned and  I had to lay on the floor when I was done.  That was not stretching, that was complete exhaustion. 

Then there is my amazing husband who took my wishes for a comfortable, easy going birthday party to heart even though he would have much rather cooked a real meal for everyone and made it fancy.  He still spent a lot of the day chopping and preparing but the man is happier with a knife in his hand and vegetables cut to uniform size.  He created atmosphere on our back deck with a tarp and sparkling lights and while I did not appreciate him scaling the trellis of our deck from the second story, I surely appreciated the ambiance when he was done.  I am sad to say he did not join us in the dress code of comfy pants though.  The polite Canadian in him could not wear pajama pants in mixed company.

And the well-wishes!  Texts, emails, phone calls and Facebook prompting my friends to wish me a happy birthday helped make the day feel truly all about me: new friends, girl friends I have known since kindergarten, family all wishing me a happy birthday.  My parents sending a care package of Buffalo goodies for everyone to enjoy: Sahlen's hot dogs, Weber's mustard and Bison chip dip were consumed with gusto.  And then my party where my house and my deck overflowed with the friends who have become my family.  My friends who came to my house in their pajama pants and comfy pants because that is what I wanted.  Friends who really did not think twice when I opened the door clad in my reindeer pajama pants.  Friends who made and wore shirts openly mocking my love of Buffalo and comfy pants.  Friends who appreciate my thriftiness....


Make lemonade?  That is silliness.

As well as friends who know I have no filter...

read who starts the game

 

I have to say that when Bill lit all 40 candles on my cake and I stood there with them ABLAZE and heard twenty plus of the dearest voices I know singing Happy Birthday to me, well, I was overcome. It was all I could do not to ugly cry right there.  Only the thought of someone catching that on film stopped the waterworks before they started because it really would have been full on open-mouthed, no sound sobbing.  In that moment I knew that from now on, every prayer I say has to start with "Dear God, I am sorry for being a sucky whiner for the last ten years because truly you have blessed me in abundance."

Perhaps 40 is all about realizing what you have and being damn grateful for it.  I saw it and heard it and felt it all with intense clarity last night.  When asked how I felt about 40 last night, I could only answer "Exuberant."  Today I would add awed, confident, fulfilled, blessed, content and even excited.  And in the immortal words of Phil Robertson, I would also have to add "Happy, happy, happy."