TODAY IS MY BIRTHDAY!  I will not even tell you how old I am because I can’t even believe it myself.  Suffice it to say that if I went back to teaching music full-time, I would be double the age of some of the new teachers.  Yikes!   The past few years with the kidney failure with extreme weight loss and then the kidney transplant followed by extreme weight gain, have really made me feel much older.  😦 I hate that, but I am thankful for another year of life to serve God, enjoy my beloved family, and love others.

Do you remember a lot of your birthdays?  I really don’t.  I know I had a big party for my 3rd birthday with several little friends over and we sat around the kids wooden picnic table out on our back patio in Southern California.  (That was the same patio where I one day carefully placed about 40 patches of grass, each adorned with two or three snails. My parents were ecstatic…or not).   I wore a sweet red-flowered dress with white lace (that matched with my 2 sisters) and fun was had by all.

My favorite birthday was my 6th grade year when I turned 11.  A bunch of friends from Aliso Elementary School were there and I can still picture us sitting in the living room.  Much to my delight, all of my gifts were my favorite things: animals!   We already had some rats, hamsters and other critters.  But that birthday, thanks to my friends and family, I added a few fish, a couple of mice, a snake, and a parakeet.  I was in heaven!  (My awesome parents would let me have any animal as long as it was in a cage, although there may have been a few escapees along the way).

My next favorite birthday is this one – TODAY!  I am alive!  I do not have a port for dialysis; I am not waiting on a transplant.  I am feeling healthy and am so grateful.  I have a safe and happy home with an incredible husband and three precious girls, plus my parents, siblings and their families all within 20 minutes.  I have some music jobs, the freedom and joy of homeschooling, more food than I need and plenty of clothes (most of which don’t fit right now -ugh)!.  PLUS, I have backyard chickens which I love.  God is good and I am thankful to have survived another year.  I anticipate another great year of fun adventures and learning. So, Happy Birthday to me.  I am so blessed!

And now, I shall leave you with a few birthday quotes…

P.S.  How do you keep track of your kiddos birthdays?  I’m not doing a very good job of keeping track of those memories.  I found a fun option on Amazon that might be interesting to some readers.  I actually have similar birthday scrapbooks for my girls that I hope to work on one of these days.  (This is an affiliate link, so if you happened to purchase this item for the listed price, I would get a very small percentage of the sale).

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