A year older

Happy (few day late) 28^th birthday to me! I would have loved to have spent the day doing Katie’s famous happy fucking birthday swim, climbing mountains and/or doing some hard running. But I have a race this weekend so instead all I got was a short swim because I’m tapering. I still want the birthday swim though so I asked for it next week. Since all I had was a swim first thing in the morning, I decided to make a few food stops on the way to work to get a vanilla iced coffee and bagel with cream cheese, both which I haven’t had in a very long time. Then I finished my breakfast off with my favorite doughnut brought in for a staff meeting because, well I’m going through doughnut withdrawals after last week. Ok I might have had two…

I got a call the morning of my birthday from family and they asked if I was doing anything that night to celebrate…ummm I don’t think so? I’m not one to have big birthday celebrations. Last year I barely acknowledged it with everything going on with my mom. A particular memory came to mind during my swim from a year ago about her and it made me start to cry, while swimming. Holidays over the past year have been difficult without her and apparently my birthday gets included in that category. She was the heart of all our celebrations. My husband had come up with the idea to surprise celebrate my birthday at the beach with my family by putting some candles in a cake and asked my sister to help coordinate it. My sister decided to take it a step further and bought a bunch of decorations. The last night of the trip my husband forced me to go on a walk on the beach. Normally I love walks on the beach (sounds so cheesy I know) but I was very tired and zero desire. After making the whole walk very difficult for him, I know understand why he insisted we kept walking. They set up everything while we were gone and surprised me when I got back. It truly was a surprise and I'm very thankful to my sister for putting together and my husband for coming up with the idea.

So one year older, a little wiser and stronger, in many ways. My 27th year on the planet was the most difficult year ever. I've learned a lot from it and I think I've grown. While growing in age it's important to continue to grow in other ways. We should always be learning, pushing ourselves to new limits, trying to figure out life. It's an on going process, you should never be done. Hopefully this next year I will continue to grow in every way possible, just not sideways.