birthdays

Good afternoon! Care for a cup of tea?

Which one would you like to try?

Simply Cinnamon Apple?

Salted Caramel?

Peppermint Bark?

Pumpkin Spice?

I personally liked the peppermint bark, but not as much as plain peppermint.

The last couple of days we have been celebrating Little Miss as she turned 11 on Thursday. We didn’t mean to celebrate her for four days but that’s how it worked out because activities we wanted to do with her were spread out a bit.

On Thursday she wanted to have pancakes at a diner downtown so her brother and I took her down. She had chocolate chip pancakes and a fresh fruit cup. The owner sang happy birthday to her.

The diner was decorated very nicely for fall. This diner always does a very nice job at decorating, from what I understand, but I have only visited there twice. My dad and son have visited there more.

After breakfast, we hung out at home for a bit and then Little Miss and I headed to my parents’ for some pizza and to celebrate her birthday with them.

We played a board game called Aggravation and Little Miss won (with a little help from Grandma and me this time, but usually she wins outright on her own). What was funny was my dad was going to play but sat down in his room for a few minutes and drifted off to sleep. I decided I would play for him and for myself until he woke up, but in the end, he didn’t wake up until the game was almost over.

Dad usually wins at this game, and he almost won this time, even though he was asleep. He was three spots from winning when my mom sent him home again because she didn’t have any other moves she could make.

After we played board games, Little Miss had an animal club meeting on Zoom and then she went home and rode bikes with her brother and then …. Yes, there is more… they watched two Disney movies. She really wrung every last minute out of her birthday and crashed pretty hard that night.

The Husband had to work on her birthday but yesterday he took the day off and we all went out to dinner at a nice restaurant and then they all went in Walmart to pick out a new dog bed and a gifts for the dog because that is what Little Miss wanted to do for her birthday. She also picked out a gift for her friend who is coming for a sleepover today because that little girl’s birthday was this past Monday.

I stayed in the car due to a sore leg and read my book. It was very cozy.

Tomorrow we are headed to a reptile zoo called Reptileland because Little Miss loves reptiles.

We are already fairly tired from celebrating already. By tomorrow night The Husband and I will be virtually comatose. We will be this way because we are, as Little Miss has reminded us a few times this week — old.

She’s been watching YouTube Shorts making fun of life in the 1990s and early 2000s and asking us if that is what it was really like “back then.”

It is hard to accept those years are so long ago, so I just pretend they aren’t and ignore her. Ha!

To show how old I am and how I have failed at educating my children about the 1990s — I learned yesterday that neither of them knew who Whitney Houston was. They sort of rolled their eyes when I mentioned her. There was some meme that mentioned her and my almost 19-year-old son said, “I don’t even know who that is.”

I was horrified and pulled up YouTube to educate them. They did recognize “I Want to Dance With Somebody” and “I Will Always Love You,” but I also made them watch her doing the Star Spangled Banner and The Boy was blown away.

“Okay, yeah, she was amazing,” he told me.

I went to tell him how she threw her life away and it was so heartbreaking to me and started to cry. She shouldn’t have died so young. No matter her talent and her beauty, she never seemed to feel worthy enough to enjoy her life of happiness and health and that always broke my heart. Now all we have left of her is her music and memories and we should have had her for so much longer.

Thank God we still have her friend and my favorite female singer CeCe Winans.

I am going to have to show them videos of CeCe this week too.

Earlier in the week I saw a beautiful sunset and even though I’m having an issue with my sciatica and leg, I made it outside to take a photo. While I was there, two guys (probably about my age) riding bikes came by our house. We do have some bike or foot traffic on our street but it is a back street so we don’t as often as some streets.

I was startled a little by them but had to laugh when the one guy looked at the sunset, pumped his fist and yelled out “’Merica!”

The other guy, with a shirt or something wrapped around the top of his head, looked up at me smiling and said, “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

I said it was, and they kept going while smiling and left me smiling.

Later, Erin (Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs) told me she thought it was cool that we’d had that shared moment together. I hadn’t thought of it that way, and her comment made me think.

After weeks of anger, hatred, and just all out sadness in the world, it was nice to have that shared moment of joy while admiring a gorgeous sunset.

The photos do not do it justice.

How about you?

How was your week last week? Anything exciting coming up for this week?

A lot about my daughter, my youngest child, was a surprise.

Her surprise conception came three months after a blighted ovum loss, which was also a surprise. I had accepted our son would probably be our only child before and after that loss. I felt amazing during my pregnancy with Little Miss. I had tons of energy and my mind was clearer than it had been in a long time. I credit the rise in progesterone for that amazing energy and mental focus because prior to my pregnancy I was being treated for access estrogen. That treatment may be why I became pregnant in the first place.

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I was sick for about a month of my pregnancy, so I don’t mean to make it sound like it was a complete blissful walk in the tulips, but the rest of the pregnancy was great. Telling our son he was having a sibling, and later a sister, was probably the most exciting moment we’d ever experienced, especially after the first heartbreak of the early miscarriage. He was at both ultrasounds – one at about nine weeks when we saw her moving around like a little chubby gummy bear and the other at around 21 weeks when we found out her sex. After the first ultrasound we went home and he sat on his dad’s chair and said “I’m going to be a big btother!” Then he paused for a moment and said, “No! I’m already a big brother because there is already a baby in there!”

When she grew larger, I would lay with him at night and he and I would feel her kicking together. He couldn’t believe how strong her kicks were, but I could because his kicks had been just as hard, if not harder. One thing he did, that she didn’t, was turn in my belly, using my ribs as leverage to complete the full twist. It was so uncomfortable and I can still feel the sensation if I think about it. He was also pushed in my belly diagonal somehow and I could feel his feet on my side and back. The midwife told me this was pretty crazy and impossible until they started to deliver him and literally felt his tiny feet around my side and back. The poor child slept diagonally for several months after his birth.

While JG came two weeks late (about), Little Miss came about two weeks early. She also came much faster than my son, who took his good old time coming out, in terms of the actual delivery. My son’s delivery was 23 1/2 hours long and Little Miss arrived in about 10 hours. I had actually asked the nurse for an epidural and the anesthesiologist had even rolled his cart into the room, but to my disappointment, there was no time for any pain relief or rest.

“It’s time to push,” my nurse said. “No time for an epidural!”

I didn’t even believe her at first. I probably pushed for 15 minutes and then there was Little Miss G, out of the womb and into the cruel, hard world.

The doctor arrived with his intern just in time to watch the intern catch the baby and the nurse handed her to me, all squished and messy. Honestly, I’m not sure what good that doctor was. One time I told him Little Miss felt like she was vibrating in my body and asked if it was normal.

“I don’t know. Is it normal for your baby?”

No idea what kind of answer that was.

Another time I had walked upstairs out of the church basement and sun glinted off the hood my car and triggered what I now know to be an ocular migraine. Flashing lights blinded me for twenty minutes while family walked around me cleaning up after the baby shower (which two people came to – I should have known then many of my friends were not real friends) and acted like nothing was happening. I thought I was having a stroke. I told the doctor at my next appointment and he asked why I was staring into the sun.

He was a real winner, as you can tell. I don’t plan to have anymore children but if I did I would not be going to him, even if he was still in the area.

My husband said he counted our little girl’s fingers and toes when she was delivered, but I actually only looked at her face to meet the tiny person who had been kicking me incessantly for the last nine months.

So today we celebrate this little surprise who is full of surprises, still, usually caused by what comes out of her mouth (like when she opened my parents’ gift this past weekend and asked “Why are there just clothes in here?” We held a small birthday party for her at my parents on Sunday with a couple of friends and her favorite (er..only uncle) and today it will just be family, some cupcakes, and of course her coveted toy for her birthday – a creepy looking Unicorn Surprise.

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