Month: June 2016

They’re singing happy birthday

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Since this is a birthday blog project, I guess I should include some birthdays!  The majority were held at our house and involved Canadian bacon & pineapple pizza.  Highlights:

  • For my fifth birthday, I had a princess party in the backyard.
  • At my sixth birthday party, we drew Little Mermaid pictures in chalk on the unfinished gameroom floor (we were in the middle of adding on to the house).
  • I had a sleepover for my seventh birthday!  The first of many…
  • My parents went temporarily insane and let me invite all the girls in the class to my eighth birthday party.  Plus Mom took us out to the pasture to ride her horse, Chase.
5th birthday
6th birthday
7th birthday
8th birthday
8th birthday
  • I didn’t have a party for my ninth birthday…
  • I had my first ice cream cake for my tenth birthday!  I actually turned ten at my party.  And we made Mariah Carey music videos wearing costumes from past dance recitals.
  • At my eleventh birthday party, we made our own t-shirts using a computer program and iron-on transfers.  Then we went out to the pasture to ride Mom’s horse again.  Most of us rode in the arena, but Amy was a bit more experienced and rode out in an open field.  Chase spooked, she fell off, and he stepped on her and cracked her pelvis.
  • My twelfth birthday party was small.  Just me, Anita, and Ashley.  We watched Titanic and tried to count the bad words like we did at all our sleepovers that year.
10th birthday
11th birthday
12th birthday
  • I have no pictures from my thirteenth or fourteenth birthdays.  Sad face.  I don’t remember much about them either, just that they were small non-sleepover parties and we played laser tag one year.
  • For my fifteenth birthday I had a sleepover again.  We went bowling and rented Miss Congeniality and Josie and the Pussycats.
  • My sixteenth birthday party started with two performances of the choir/theatre production of Love, Love, Love (Kate and me onstage, everyone else in the audience).  Then we went to my house for a sleepover, where I turned sixteen at midnight.  We watched The Princess Diaries and A Walk to Remember.
15th birthday
16th birthday
  • For my seventeenth birthday, I had a double birthday party with Kate (because our birthdays are only a week and a half apart and we’re the same person anyway).  It was super fun, despite the fact that guy-I-was-totally-in-love-with-even-though-he-already-had-a-girlfriend actually brought his girlfriend along without asking if he could.
  • Kate and I had another double party for our eighteenth birthday.  After random fun stuff at her house, we went swing dancing and got to dance with a bajillion people during the special birthday dance!
17th birthday
18th birthday

And that was my last birthday party, if such things are defined as a gathering of friends with activities including singing, blowing out candles on a cake, and opening presents.

I’ve still found ways to celebrate since then though.  Some big (Hanson concerts, Vandy Homecoming, trip to NYC that got postponed by Frankenstorm) and some small (dinner with parents, various theatre performances or rehearsals).  Not sure yet what I want to do this year, but I think I may actually put in a little effort and plan something.

Hundreds of stories

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A typical sight on our annual summer family vacations.  Cooking on the camp stove with our tent in the background.

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I was super happy to discover this picture in the boxes of slides I’ve been scanning, because some of my favorite memories from family vacations are actually from the campsites.  Specifically, in the tent at bedtime.  When Dad would tell stories.  That he made up as he went along.  And they were freaking hysterical.

I can’t tell you when any of the specific stories were told, or where we were.  I only recall a few titles, and I don’t remember any plot details.  But to this day, they still appear in conversations occasionally.  And we always recognize them when they do.

“The Finkles and the Farkles”

“The Amoeba and the Protozoa”

And the goat that said, “Pppppbbbbbbttttt” (how do you spell a sound???)

Then there was one night when I wanted to contribute.  Amy Grant was my favorite singer at the time, so I sang “El Shaddai” for my family.  Including all the Hebrew lyrics.  And a moment of silence before the second verse, while I played the instrumental bridge in my head (I made sure to tell them that’s what I was doing so they wouldn’t think I was finished).  I was around 7 or 8, and still terrified of singing by myself in front of people.  But I guess I just decided that being a part of the family nighttime experience was more important.  Like one of my favorite movies says:

Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear

Of course, lying in a dark tent in our sleeping bags when I couldn’t actually see anyone helped too!

A strong enough foundation

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Today we go way back… to December 1986.

This was a surprisingly emotional box of slides for me to scan.  It included pictures from my birth day and baptism, none of which I remember seeing before.  Some of the pictures at the hospital are among the most beautiful I’ve ever seen, including a few of my sister meeting me for the first time (saving those for a sister post later, which I’m sure will make her cry for at least a month).  And I loved seeing pictures from my baptism.  Yay God!

I was baptized at a children’s mass.  I knew that, but I still wasn’t expecting to see all the kids crowded around.  Only a few months old and already captivating an audience!

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Other things about this picture that make me happy:

  • the expressions on my parents’ and godparents’ faces
  • my dad holding up my sister so she can see
  • my hand on my forehead in reaction to the water just poured over me

Not really sure what else to say that the picture doesn’t already cover.

So, yeah.  That’s how it all started.  And I could not be more thankful.