XXXI

Tomorrow is my birthday and it will be my 31st!  Here is my 1st birthday, when my mom made me a sweet little doll and I ate a birthday banana with a candle in it:

And my 11th birthday, when I had just finished my first year of being homeschooled and enjoyed wearing very large glasses and even larger bows:

And I couldn't find a picture of my actual 21st birthday, but here is one from right around then:

There is Kool-Aid in those wine glasses and we are all holding pretzels.  No, really.  This is me (on the left) and my roommates from my last 2 years of college, and the summer I turned 21 between my junior and senior years we all stayed in College Station to take summer classes or do research in a lab or whatever. One of my roommates turned 21 a couple of weeks after me and I have a bunch of pictures of her 21st birthday (complete with the cake I baked her) but none of my own.  Several weeks before this picture was taken, I had postponed my upcoming wedding (to someone other than Rob) from the following Christmas to the next summer and I would call off my engagement altogether a few months after this picture was taken.  My fiance was, I think, a little hurt that I chose to stay in College Station that summer rather than return to Fort Worth where he and my parents lived, and probably rightfully so.  That summer my roommates and I watched Casablanca and the original Solaris in Russian and went to Bible study at our church and I baked a lot of pies for our consumption.  I worked in a laser optics lab in the physics department and joined the campus improv comedy troupe. We thought it was really funny (well, I still do) to take carefully composed pictures with props, preferably on black and white film.  Gosh, I was happy then (aside from the whole relationship thing).  Really, exuberantly, goofily happy.

And today on the brink of my 31st birthday I find myself again very happy with my life.  Tomorrow I am going to go to lunch with my parents and Grace and Violet at a really delicious Thai place and then I will go get a pedicure while the girls stay at my parents' house.  Rob will be working late-ish so we will do a combined birthday-anniversary celebration this coming weekend where I believe we will break open a bottle of red wine (I choose not to put Kool-Aid in my wine glasses anymore) and try to do pizza outside on the grill.  Hooray for birthdays!