Birthday Girl

First, THANK YOU to all the friends and email buddies and just plain nice folks who sent me birthday wishes. Today I am 35. I spend much of my time writing, administering, and analyzing surveys (well, I actually spend most of my time procrastinating the latter, but I understand that that just makes me more of an academic). So to me, this means that I am no longer "25-34," and even worse, I am no longer "under 35." Also, as an infertile, I am now in that steep part of the fertility graph, sliding down at increasing velocity: think of it as the toboggan of fecundity-doom. Okay, don't. Like it matters, anyway: being 29 when I started TTC did, um, exactly jack-shit (I think that's the medical term) for my personal chances of conceiving easily, and as the kids get older I am starting to feel more sure that our family is complete. Don't quote me on that one, though.

So, it's a little weird, a little freaky. I kind of feel like my life has been frozen since Henry & Eleanor were born; actually since they were conceived. I have to remind myself not to say "thirty-one" when people ask me how old I am (and don't ask me how they can be two and I can be 35 now and 31 when they were conceived, but it's actually true). So I guess I don't really believe it. I suspect I will feel more and more like this. I know my mom thinks that the fact that she's in her 60's is a big joke, except of course when she looks at her retirement funds.

So my day, it was nice. Ish. It involved a trip to a yarn store, because, you know, how could it not. Webs, of course. They were having this goofy radio promotion. I'm such a dork, I thought, "Hey, a drawing for a $250 shopping spree, there will probably be only a few hundred people in the hat, MAX. Definitely worth doing." So I get there right before it's about to end, and there are people milling around and I see the box for the drawing, but to enter you're supposed to shake some radio guy's hand and I have no idea who this guy is or where he is and it feels kind of wrong to just enter without doing the required steps (dork, remember? Yes, dork). So I just poke around for a minute and then get SUUUUCKKKED into the world of yarn.

I emerge a really very restrained 30 minutes later and the whole thing is over and it's too late to enter. Shit. I probably wouldn't have won anyway, but you know, I actually have won things like that before, and wow, it sure would have been nice. Can you say, "drum carder?" Or perhaps a swift and some combs? Or maybe enough nice English wool to make St. Brigid and plenty left over for fun?

So the worst part of it, and this is where I am such a huge dork that you really will be shaking your head in pity for my stupidity, the worst part is that I kind of rushed to get there before this thing was supposed to end at 2, and so I decided to go the pharmacy to get my inhaler at the end of my outing instead of at the beginning. Yeah, because breathing=optional; more yarn I don't have enough time to knit with and a contest I didn't even enter when I had the chance=much more important than breathing. (I should mention that I only get asthma a few times a year, at the tail end of a cold. And when I try to run. I was recently diagnosed with it and I'm new to this whole thing. My previous technique was to suffer through the colds and, um, never exercise if I could help it. Still haven't done anything about that last part.)

So did I mention that I was thinking about making St. Brigid? I know, nothing like going for the gusto, but I want a long-term thinker project, with cables, damnit! So I went to the library, which conveniently has Alice Starmore's Aran Knitting (no, I am not paying over $100 for it on eBay). And lo and behold, my local library, which has crapola in terms of infertility books, actually has a great fiber arts section. So I checked out more books than I can ever read to go with the more yarn than I can ever knit. And I headed over to the pharmacy, which, as the weather started to turn rainy, was becoming increasingly urgent.

And it was, and I say this in the nicest possible way, Fucking Closed. It closed at 3pm. Who closes at 3 pm on a Saturday? Well, apparently my pharmacy. I got there at 3:15. So it was off to the CVS to get some primatine mist, which I don't even know if it's okay for me to use but I was desperate and I had seen ads on TV with little arrows going through people's lungs in a friendly kind of way and I thought it might help. Mostly it just got me high though. Well, I survived 34 years without an inhaler, what's one more day, right? I just thought it would have been nice to breathe on my birthday. Totally My Own Fault, too, which really just makes it worse.

So that was a lot of bitching wasn't it? And apparently the anniversary of my birth brings out the sailor in me, language-wise, so apologies there. Despite not breathing and losing out on theoretical free fiber stuff, it was a fun day (oh yeah, and the part about having to do freelance work this morning, whatever).

Rhys made breakfast and brought me coffee on the couch; she corralled the kids while I bought yarn. Gifts included the third season DVDs from The West Wing (I need fantasy--Martin Sheen is my President!); some carded and dehaired cashmere MIL bought off some lady who was spinning it in Mongolia (note, it feels and smells a lot like wool--do you think she got ripped off? Is there a burn test or something I can do to check? Won't tell her, though); and my own little shopping spree. I got a bunch more Lana D'Oro and some pink superwash for a sweater for Eleanor. And shoes. On sale. For me.

Dinner was at our favorite BBQ place, and that was yummy, then we got a cake from Cold Stone Creamery. Cold Stone is kind of un-PC in our town because it's one of a few chains that have recently moved in after years of almost all of downtown being locally-owned (not to mention the cultural clash of singing ice cream scoopers in a New England town that serves attitude on the side of everything). But I wanted cake and it's my birthday. And the independent ice cream shops don't have cake. Okay? I'll try to do better next year, but man that is good ice cream.

The kids were about as cute as can be singing me happy birthday and DYING to eat the cake the whole way home with it. Nobody gets into the birthday spirit like a couple of two-year-olds.

So that was my day. All in all a nice one. Now off to watch the Apprentice I taped, before I read about what happened on someone else's blog. Stop blogging about my stupid reality shows before I have a chance to see them, people! (Just kidding, blog about whatever you want.)

Gratuitous cute kid shot, because, say it with me: it's my birthday!