Cerebral Celebration

Living this life requires a certain amount of celebration. 

 

Living on this planet requires skill, work, and a positive attitude. It is often joyous and full of adventure. Sometimes it is mundane. Sometimes life is rocky and rough and the celebration of something as small as a job well done, or as marvelous as a birthday can smooth out the edges, and add sweetness to an otherwise tastes-like-dirt kind of day.

As a summer birthday girl, birthday celebrations have always meant swimming pool parties and up-till-late slumber parties. Memories of my own birthdays can be invoked with just the right hint of Copper Tone and the damp smell of chlorine laden towels.

When my oldest daughter was born two days after my birthday, I was giddy with the knowledge that the summer birthday tradition would carry on...and on and on it has!  My sweet July girl loves her swimming pool birthdays, and her friends always rave that they are the best ones of the year.  We make no fuss and do no fancy games or themes or treats.  Just cake and pizza at the pool... and the kids just swim, swim, swim.

Remarkably, here it is just days before my youngest turns 5.  A Halloween-y baby is she.  Thanks to indoor swimming pools, she's decided she wants a pool party too, and so we'll head down to the pretty cool Genoveva Chavez Center in Santa Fe, and maybe my little one will try her new found dunking skills on the big slide.

 

Birthdays are important.  They create big anticipation and are almost always filled with laughter, joy, and smiles. But I never would have realized how important they are to Moms if I had never become one. Before I had children, birthdays were a selfish fiesta of  a day that was "all about me," or a more generous, "what can I do for you," when it came to my dear friends and my partner. 

But now that I'm a mother, and I've experienced the intensity of pregnancy and birth, and all the wonder and amazement, exhaustion and excitement, confusion and cuddling that accompanies growing with my children...I can honestly say that I have a new-found respect for birthdays. As my soft spot for my children's birthdays grows deeper, I have a better understanding of my own Mother, and why she always helped to make my birthday special. She still does, in fact. She, too, must have that same sweet collection of memories of my actual birth day...her own pregnancy, labor, and delivery of a little baby that turned into me. 

 

Birthdays are a festival of the very best cake, a wonderful dinner, and presents.  Nowadays, I tend to splurge on a nice thing or two for myself, but I tend to get a little crazy when I shop for my kids...they deserve it all, you know...whatever it is they want. And if I am unable to get everything on the list, I hope that others can fill in the holes.  So far, it seems that most everything on Signe's wish list has been acquired, with a little help from family!

This desire to fulfill my kids' wishes was discovered when Nena was still a tiny baby and probably wasn't wishing for anything yet.  Only 5 months old for her 1st Christmas, I went a little crazy with gifts in anticipation of all the joys she'd have as she grew older. It was made worse by the fact that her grandparents and we were burgeoning with extra money, and a baby seemed like the perfect person to shower the gifts upon. Late night Christmas eves have been the norm around my house...with last minute Santa placements, and sometimes a few mechanical struggles to make the hours grow later and later.

Lately, I've been wishing for a different Christmas tradition. The excess consumption and waste of paper and plastic does sometimes make me cringe inside. I wish to be more creative so that I can still fulfill my sweethearts' dreams for Christmas joy, but feel like I'm being gentler on the planet. 

Time with family, friends, baking, and creating...these are all the best parts of any celebration.  I would like to focus on those aspects more--to fill up the hearts of my loved ones with love and attention.

Someday, I would like to find a new location to celebrate the holiday season...a place completely different from our mountain location. 

My dream involves a bungalow on the beach, swimming in the ocean all day, and lounging peacefully in the tropical air in the evening.  Someday...

Photo Copyright Sandra Aamodt

Cycles

Many of us know that life travels in cycles...sometimes big and obvious ones like the seasonal cycles...but there is also the very non-linear circuitous way that life ebbs and flows. Last year at this time, my youngest daughter would fall asleep around 9 or 9:30 at night, and sleep until 9 or 10 in the morning. Lately, everyone has been falling asleep between 8:30 and 10 pm, and waking early--like around 6 or 6:30, despite the fact that the mornings are darker and darker each day. I like watching and observing these more subtle cycles, and I'm so grateful that my kids are able to live within their own. Not being pushed or rushed or limited to a time-constrained day surely helps them to live a life that is less hindered and more free, even if we still have schedules to abide by in general.

Sig has been hopping over milestones lately. After an entire summer spent at the pool, which has now been closed for nearly a month, she suddenly discovered that she can go entirely underwater. Because this is her new-found fun, she wants to go out into the hot tub every day. It's pretty fun to watch her go under over and over and over. This will bring a whole new level of fun into our pool days...the slides, diving boards, and all the other fun can be more thoroughly explored. I'm sure that it took my little one so long to feel comfortable with her head under the water because of the one snafu I pulled while staying at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. They have an awesome pool with some really amazing, established landscaping. The palms are huge, and the whole pool area is a tropical funzone. They have some pretty cool slides too. When Sig was 2, I had her in my lap while we zoomed down a slide, and my foot slipped on the pool bottom when we came off and we both went under. That was the last day she ever put her head under water intentionally until last week.

She also learned how to do the monkey bars on her own. And then she discovered that she could crawl on top of them. In absolute adorable terms, she said to me while crawling along the top, "Now that I'm nearly five, I am learning how to do so many things! Look at me! Who knew I would go underwater and crawl on top of the monkey bars all in one week?"

Really, who would've thunk?

Of course, who would've ever guessed that she's be a wig afficionado, as well?