Thirty-three

Today is my birthday. Hooray! I guess.

I have mixed feelings about the significance of birthdays. I don’t have conflicted feelings about birthdays themselves; that is, I’m not someone who bemoans getting older (at least, not yet). I’m in my early thirties, for crying out loud, and I detest when people my age complain about being “old.” Puh-leeze. No, it’s more that I have mixed feelings about how big of a deal should be made of one’s birthday as an adult. I mean, I’m not going to go all Jehovah’s Witness on everyone and eschew celebrating birthdays altogether, but do I really need to mark the passage of each year or my life with some big hullabaloo? Probably not, right?

This debate is theoretical, really, since I rarely do much for my birthday, anyway. This year my birthday is especially anticlimactic since I’ll be spending it with a baby (my baby, as a matter of fact) and pretty much no one else. Al is traveling for business, my parents are moving into their new house, and everyone else is just going about their Tuesday morning, so it’s just me and Miss Lucia today. (This is not to say that my birthday has passed by unnoticed: Al took me out to a great dinner this past weekend and I think I can probably wrangle another birthday dinner out of him this weekend, too). I’m fine with the fact that I’ll be spending today putting soiled diapers out for collection, doing laundry, taking Lucia to baby music class, working during her naps, and all of the other things I normally do on a Tuesday. This is my life, and it’s a good one.

Last night, I was looking through the journal that I kept while I was pregnant to see what I was up to at this time last year, when I was turning thirty-two. Back then, I was three months away from giving birth. I was going to yoga classes and writing 2000 words a day in a manuscript and practicing Hypnobabies techniques and taking naps (NAPS!!). I had no idea what my life would look like today, but I knew it would involve poopy diapers. Yep. Also, fewer naps, more coffee. But also, way more baby laughter, which kind of outweighs everything else. All in all, I’d say thirty-three year old Steph has the better end of the deal than thirty-two year old Steph, despite all the naps that younger lady got to take. After all, I get to spend my birthday with this hilarious little person:

Anyway. It’s time for me to wake up Lulu so we can make it on time to her baby music class, which might end up being the cutest way possible I could celebrate my thirty-third birthday. Enjoy your Tuesday, everyone.

4 Comments

      • What kinds of projects do you spill those words on? You don’t have to answer if that’s TMI. I’m just always curious how other writers spend their writing time ( personal projects vs obligations, social media, etc).

        • Working on a manuscript of a novel now. Since I started writing as a job, I have written three full manuscripts and I’m halfway through a first draft of a fourth now. The challenge is getting published, as I’m sure you can appreciate. 😉 I also do some short fiction. And I freelance. And I blog! So there is always stuff to work on, although I only count words when I’m working on a manuscript.

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