36 years ago today my beautiful mother (seriously, she has no right to look that good minutes after giving birth to me without an epidural! I look absolutely horrid in my post-delivery pictures after having my boys...) gave birth to me in the local hospital of my dad's hometown. My parents had no medical insurance (my dad had just barely graduated from law school and was about to start his first job in Los Angeles after taking the bar). They decided to drive up to my grandparents house in Centerfield, Utah, so I could be born in Gunnison Valley hospital where the cost of an unmedicated delivery (and a much less than 24-hour hospital stay) was a lot less than it would have been in L.A. So, this born-and-raised California girl is actually a Utahn by birth! My poor mom had been hanging out at her in-laws' for two weeks already (maybe more?), but I refused to be born. And then, when I finally decided to make my appearance, the doctor took his sweet time in getting to the delivery room, making my poor mom wait some more for me to finally be born. I was born at 12:05 AM on August 31, 1976, but my mom likes to say that I should have been born on the 30th-- if it hadn't been for that inconsiderate doctor! :-) That's OK, I think the 31st is a cool birthday, and growing up I thought being born in the early morning was way better than being born late at night. That way, as soon as I woke up on my birthday morning, I'd already technically be that next year older! Of course, now that I'm getting older, I wouldn't mind holding on to those last few hours of my earlier age just a little bit longer. :-)
2. I got some pretty great things for my birthday this year. Yesterday afternoon we closed on our new house. Yep, I got a new house for my birthday. :-) It was a bit anticlimactic because we didn't actually get the keys or anything since the (former) owners are going to stay for another week or two until they close on their new house, but still-- we get to start paying another mortgage! Woo hoo! :-)
I told the boys that all I wanted for my birthday was one day of no fighting or arguing. Well, with three boys so close in age, I understand that going a WHOLE 24 hours with NO fighting or arguing with each other (or with me!) is pretty much an impossibility. But, they gave it a good effort and it was a very peaceful day. Only one incident of boy one knocking the wind out of boy two, and boy two going after the boy one, ending with that boy one wailing copiously and crying, "He broke my neck! Why did he break my neck?!"* Ahh. The joys of motherhood. :-)
As for myself, I gave myself the day off of school lessons. The boys thought that was pretty cool. I've been burning the midnight oil recently (as the time stamps of these blog posts will attest), up till after 2 AM nearly every night, and I was pretty wrecked and needed to sleep in, do some chores, get my haircut, and relax a little. It was a great day.
3. Tonight we went to cheesecake factory. Man, that place is good, but expensive now that I've got two boys that want to order adult entrees. But, once a year is OK. :-) I got the veggie burger and lemoncello cream torte and it was wonderful. During dinner Ben entertained the boys with his make-a-knife-disappear-under-a-napkin trick, which he has been doing with them for years, and they STILL haven't figured out how he does it. Maybe they never will. I'll never spill the secret. And then all of them had to try their hand at all sorts of disappearing tricks involving forks and spoons and knives and hands, and it was hilarity for everyone. Good thing we had a booth tucked into the corner mostly away from other diners.
4. Then, home again, off to bed for the boys, and into the garage for me where I spent more than an hour trying to remember how to use the router, and searching for the little bits of loose hardware that comes with template we bought to install hinges and door plates into the new doors we are hoping to use to replace the old ones upstairs. This door project has been way longer than I ever anticipated. Seemed like a simple thing to buy a few doors (really, only 5), paint them, attach the hardware, and hang. It would have been around $100 (I think) per door to have them installed by Lowes, and I thought, "Pshh! I can do that myself!" And I *can*, it's just taken me weeks and weeks and hours and hours and hours in a hot garage. But, there's still that stubborn Hansen part of me that is appalled to pay good money to someone for something I can do perfectly well myself! Oh well. The worst of it, now that I'm approaching the end of the project, is that I really ought to have at least made it a learning experience for the boys, and had them help me. But the garage is a furnace in the middle of the day (still way too hot for me at night, even with the door halfway up and a fan blowing on me), and I'm not keeping the boys up until 2:00 AM, no matter how awesome the life skills are that they could be learning. What is the lesson? Don't do big projects that require work in the garage in the middle of the Texas summer.
5. Also, today is a blue moon! That must mean 36 is going to be a lucky year for me. :-)
*I'm not naming names, but in this scenario, Joseph was boy 3. :-)
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