Thirty five

Last Tuesday I turned thirty five. It actually came as a bit of a surprise my birthday I have to admit. I mean, I knew it was coming, it is hard not to when you are sandwiched between two boys who count the days to their own, but I was so busy with the chaos that is our life right now to actually acknowledge that it really is my birthday. It is a weird time in our life right now, with lots of questions and waiting to get answers, and if there is one thing I am not good at (as in horribly horribly bad at) it is waiting. I am not good with sitting and waiting for time to pass, waiting for others to decide my fate, waiting for things to run their course. I get impatient, negative, annoying. And in the middle of all this, I was supposed to celebrate my "you are officially half way to 70" birthday. I know 35 isn't a significant number, but it is just that point were you are no longer "around 30" but "thirty something". Don't get me wrong, I am not looking to go backwards. I love getting older, I love being able to look around and see how young people are, well, stupid, and to have the ability to say that because I am old. I love everything I have achieved with age - I am now so much better at being me than I was when I was younger.
But sometimes I just wish I still had the one thing that young people have and I don't - ignorance. When you are young you have time, you have enough time for everything and the ability to believe that it will never run out. The older you get the more clearly you see the sand dripping down the hourglass.
The older you get the more every minute counts, every dream you wanted to achieve becomes a question of if and not when, the regrets starts looming bigger and bigger. This is my biggest fear, the fear of regrets. I don't have many, but the ones I do have are not things I will be able to change anymore, and I really don't want to add to the list.
So I've made a list. This was my gift to me this year - the list of things I would regret never doing, and the promise to make them all happen.

The first item on my list was to have more fun. These past few months have not been easy, actually they have been very depressing and everything that could go wrong did, and I have stopped living almost completely. I won't lie, things are not any better today, and I do feel guilty about having fun in the midst of all the problems and unknowns, but first of all there is less that can go wrong (after all, most has already happened) and as Hidai told me - we tried the no-fun way, it's not like it helps anything, so now it's time to take a deep breath and believe that it will all be for the best at the end. And have fun in the meantime.
And so, for my birthday week (it's because we do the celebration and gifts in the morning, so it has to be the weekend, and when your birthday is mid-week you get extra days) I got -
1. A gloriously sunny day and my first iced-coffee of the year (which I love even more than regular coffee, and which I only drank half of because it was too cold for me)

2. Lots of hugs and kisses (hey, I have two boys. One of which has announced that he is in training to become a teenager. I have to find special occasions and / or bribe them for kisses).

3. A day out in Oxford St. like Hidai and I used to do whenever we came to London as tourists. We went to all the shops I love, had coffee at our "usual" Pret, and bought my birthday gift - two pairs of earrings, which is my favourite kind of jewellery, and that I haven't bought since we've left Gibraltar.

4. Three days of stomach virus for Yon and myself. Ah, the fun never ends. But I did get to see all the TV I wanted and read three books because Hidai was in charge of everything.
5. A cake made by all my boys - Ron got over excited, Yon made a mess and Hidai suffered through, and they all made sure I will be there to supervise, but I got a heart-shaped-chocolate-cake that I did not make. I did try to suggest I might want a different cake this year, but that was too much for them to handle, so I just chose a different recipe for a chocolate cake and got the traditional one.

6. A card from each of them. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it is my favourite part, especially this year when Yon wrote one, and Ron went off-script and did not write the same thing as he does every year. And Hidai always writes the best cards and makes me cry every year.

7. A musical. That was the real gift I asked Hidai for. We haven't been to one in ages, and I really wanted to go out for a lovely evening with the whole dinner and a show thing. That was not in the cards unfortunately because... Well, I couldn't think of a good lie here, because we don't have a sitter. The kids don't do well with us going out at night, and so we just... Don't. So instead we decided to take the kids to see The Lion King, and do a Pret and Matinee thing. Since Yon went through a Lion King craze a few months ago (up until it was replaced by Frozen) we all know the 3 movies (yes, there are three Lion King movies) and songs by heart, and though I was a bit worried how he will do we all loved it.

8. Movie nights - we watched The Never Ending Story with the boys in an effort to educate them about the eighties and honestly just felt even older, Any Given Sunday (without the boys, though they didn't like it), because Hidai remembered a line from there and then we just had to watch it again (still a great movie, even if you don't like American Football), and The Internship which we somehow missed when it came out last year and is indeed a very funny movie.

This morning my Happy Birthday sign went down, and my week of celebration has officially ended. Life is still weird, confusing and needs a lot of waiting. But they are also full of love and fun and laughter. And in the end of the day, I have already accomplished my biggest wish of them all - I have my boys, who in each and every day makes me feel like a room without a roof.