I felt sentimental today and took pictures of Clarissa when I dropped her off at school.
Today was my birthday, and it was a great day! A lot of friends and family reached out to me to say happy birthday, which made me feel loved. I summarized the first half of my day to my AXB friends so I’ll post that here for efficiency:
“This birthday has been special already. My spirituality often takes the form of dreams and or thoughts that hit me like bone-deep impressions. This morning as I was transitioning from being asleep to being awake, the thought “life is a gift” rolled through me in a very visceral way. I hadn’t realized it was my birthday yet, and I’ve been grateful to start my 38th year with that experience.
It’s not a typical birthday, but it’s a great one. Lily is out of town to help a friend move to Baltimore. Her friend helped process Afghanistan refugees at military bases for the last 6 months and now that most of the refugees have left the base and gone to local refugee organizations, she’s moving to Baltimore to help process people at one of those local orgs. Lily was sad to miss my birthday and I miss her, but I’m so happy she can support her friend in that way, and also get a much needed break from the kids.
Also, funny enough Jan 28 is Qualtrics annual day of service. All the employees get the day off to help the community. As such, I spent time connecting one of my friends from Chicago (Nick Barnes) with a non-profit legal agency to help him with a crazy situation. He was on disability and didn’t realize he was working too many hours, and social security finally realized it and is now asking him to pay them back $22,000, but he’s still steeped in medical bills and barely surviving paycheck to paycheck. Anyway, I think this non-profit is going to take his case and assign him a probono lawyer, so that was a big success.
I was also going to ski today, but Ammon has been sick all week and so I’m watching him at home while the others are at school. I took him to the Doctor and it seems like its a nasty virus.”
The doctor did say Ammon’s condition could be food poisoning, but he thought is was more likely to be a virus, and thought it’s contagious window was probably winding down, but he could possibly still be contagious.
I mostly caught up on work and life at my computer until I picked up Clarissa, Mary and Lydia from school. Then we went home briefly so Lydia could practice harp. Then everyone loaded in the car and I took Lydia to voice, picked up Basil, picked Lydia up and fueled up. Here are videos that K-9 Wasatch sent us for Basil’s week at the daycare:
Then I tidied the house to prepare for my dad and Suzanne coming over. They arrived right at 6 with an amazing looking ice-cream cake. They also treated use to Aubergine for dinner. After a delicious dinner, they listened to Lydia and Mary play their instruments. Then they brought a game I used to play with when I was a kid, barrel of monkeys. We’d forgotten how to play, but once we looked it up and got rolling, everyone had such a blast. My dad got a chain of 15 monkeys which blew us all away!
After playing Barrel of Monkeys, Clarissa danced to ‘Let it Go’ for us:
We then ate ice-cream cake and I got to chat with my dad. I also opened gifts including money from my dad and Suzanne for ski lessons, Joshua Tree National Park socks form Lydia and Mary, a beautiful colored cupcake card from Mary, and another card Mary helped with from Clarissa. Suzanne was so sweet with how much she helped clean. All the kids loved seeing Baps and bapa. Then my dad and Suzanne went to visit Georgia and take her some cake. They had a long and wonderful visit and Georgie told me she loved visiting with them so much. All in all, I had a great day. Lily sent me the sweetest text with things she loves about me, and I got to talk to her which was really great. I also had a lot of friends and family reach out to wish me happy birthday, as I mentioned before and the time with my dad and Suzanne was so fun.
The only bad thing about my birthday was my behavior with Lydia. Still feeling exhausted from the week, I went to bed at 10:30. Lydia dropped in on me at midnight and woke me up. I told her to figure it out and go back to sleep. Then I felt anger that I was awake when I felt I needed sleep so badly. I went all the way upstairs to chew out Lydia and tell her there is no scary doll, and she can’t keep doing this to me. She broke down crying and said it wasn’t the thoughts about a scary doll that she’s been having, it was just that she couldn’t sleep and she wanted to sleep in my bed. My heart melted and I felt awful for chewing her out when she just has trouble falling asleep sometimes. I let her sleep in my bed, and Ammon joined us at some-point during the night. I continued apologizing this morning as I felt so bad.
But otherwise, it was a great great day.
Today, Lily spent time with her Cousin Louie and Ginny and their two adorable kids. Here are pictures from their time together:
