blessings > bummers

anyone who knows me at all knows that i love my birthday.  like, I LOVE MY BIRTHDAY.  for real. i don't even care that each one means i'm getting old (mostly because there are lots of other signs that point to that fact every ding dang day), it's always been my most favorite day of the year.  even more than christmas because let's face it...my birthday is all mine.  heh.

it also doesn't even matter that it's a quarantine birthday.  everybody else has been celebrating their birthdays in these times of covid-19, and i'm certainly no different.  granted, i never really imagined back in march that we'd still be dealing with covid, but here we are.  i'm healthy, my friends and family are as well, and there are way more blessings in my life than bummers.  i'm grateful for that fact every single day.

i went looking for a fun vintage photo of me to share and ended up falling down a major rabbit hole that had me howling with laughter over a ton of old pictures i hadn't seen in forever.  stuff like backups of the photo booth app on my computer circa 2009, photo dumps from my very first iPhone, folders full of pictures throughout the bean's life plus more from before she was even a twinkle in our eye.  i'll have to bust some of them out in a couple of weeks when we celebrate her 13th (!!!!!!) birthday.

and so even after that walk down memory lane, i didn't find much in the way of baby photos of me.  all i came up was this one - my very first passport photo:

awwwwww.  she was so cute.  what happened??

for the last two days, the bean banished me from our shared office while she worked on...well, something big, from what she tells me.  she's roped in the rest of the family - the hub, the old lady and her special friend - and there's been lots of giggling and whispering going on.  i've been so amused at the shenanigans, and super touched because of all of the effort she's put in.  and knowing her and her type-A personality, she'll settle for no less than perfection.  good thing she doesn't have to show up for any classes on fridays, because from what i've gathered she's taken on quite the project that's requiring a lot of work.  because she had me take her to the local dollar store for supplies, here's a list of the hints i've gotten:

10+ poster boards
a TON of brown (and a few other primary colors) paint
some sort of see-through silver fabric
blue painter's tape
a ton of cackling between her and her sister
and the actual hint she gave me - i'll have to be okay with crouching down in a small space for some unspecified amount of time

i'm insanely excited to see what she's got in store for me - and finding out that she thought this was my 50th birthday was really amusing, although she swears that had nothing to do with the magnitude of this surprise she's concocting.  i just hope i don't end up with a sore back or require some level of massage afterwards.

also - she popped out of the office late last night to tell me that i won't have to squeeze into a box anymore, but instead should be ready to be pulled around...on a towel.  and the supply list was expanded to include various colors of cardstock, a large circle punch, a regular hole punch and some twine.

this is gonna be good.  i can't wait to report back to share what the big surprise was.  in the meantime, the countdown to 50 officially begins.

yes, i'm going to spend the entire year counting down.  i've learned over the last year or so that while we all grumble about getting old - but you know what?  that shit is a GIFT.  i'll take the gray hairs and the reading glasses and the slowing metabolism and age spots on my cheeks...because it all means that i'm living life, and i'm not taking that for granted.