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The Gift of Experience

My birthday is coming up in a few short days (well, ten, but I know they’ll fly by) and I LOVE my birthday. I love it for a ton of reasons, but I almost love the days leading up to it more than the actual day.

Barry and I have had a long-standing tradition of not exchanging gifts, but planning a trip to take the birthday person on. We’ve had the most wonderful times and also some doozies on these birthday getaways, but best of all we’re together.

I’m no good at keeping secrets and am usually about to explode by the time Barry’s birthday rolls around. I just get so excited that we’re about to go somewhere new. Barry, on the other hand, is cool, calm and totally collected when it comes to my birthday excursion. It drives me nuts.

I’ve been working on him a bit this past week and he hasn’t dropped a single hint. Yesterday I casually shared with him my worry about Maggie crawling up the stairs ‘over my birthday weekend’ and a couple days before that I asked him what time we needed to catch the ferry when we left to ‘celebrate my birthday.’ I got a good laugh from him out of both my comments, but not a peep.

I then wondered aloud if he had anything planned and he smirked and asked when the last birthday I’ve had that he didn’t have something in the works well before I started searching for hints. So, yeah, that guy has got something up his sleeve and I’m chomping at the bit to find out what it is, even if that means I’ll be a year older.

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Kissy, Kissy

Mags is learning to ‘give loves’ and it is a slobbery mess, but I’ll take ’em. Sometimes her kisses turn into bites and so we’re working to distinguish between the two. Seeing as the poor child has been kissed nearly every minute of her life, you’d think she’s be able to plant a good one here or there.

In other news, we (and I mean Barry) is thisclose to finishing some of our FALL gardening/weeding. I’m not sure I really remember what our garden looks like, it has been so long since I spent a significant amount of time with it. There was a point when Maggie was a few months old and my parents were visiting and I got to go outside and do some major cutting back. It felt so good!

At one point my dad was inside with tiny Maggie walking around the house with her as the rest of us were outside….it started to rain and I kept on cutting back the bushes in front of our house until they really couldn’t be cut back anymore. It was so satisfying to be outside and ripping and tearing, but equally satisfying in a very different way, to come back inside and hold my new baby.

As Maggie learns to give kisses and mixes in a few bites, I think about that day all those months ago where I spent part of my day ferociously cutting down part of our cherry (?) tree and ripping out weeds, only to be called inside to peel off my dirty clothes and tend to my hungry baby. Some moments feel like bites and other like big, sloppy kisses. I’ll take both, thankyouverymuch.

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Walk-N-Talk

Before we had Maggie we would take Syd for an early morning and evening walk, but things got switched around once Maggie showed up on the scene and the poor pug has been missing out on her double-a-day walks. We’ve  recently gotten back into the swing of things, it only took us 9 months.

On the days that it isn’t raining Maggie, Syd and I walk with Barry to work and it is a great way to start our day together. However, when the time comes to leave Barry at work, Sydney is always a bit confused and depressed. She’ll sit down and look mournfully at Barry as he trudges to work. Sadly, I think it’s a bit funny to see that she’s so concerned about Barry going a different direction.

We’ve also reinstated the evening stroll and I think I may have forgotten how much I love this time with my husband. Sometimes we spend our time talking about details of the day, other times we talk only of our daughter or our silly dog. But bit by bit the conversation unravels itself until we’ve either found ourselves back home or back to our car with chilly hands, a happy Pug and a baby anxious to get her own evening “walk” in.