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I am aware that I don’t necessarily look old. It helps that I am smaller than the average ten-year-old and still have long hair. Still, I don’t fool the carnies at the guess-your-age booth. I’m now 34.

34 is such a loaded age for a woman. It’s the first year of your mid-thirties, the last year before the sharp fertility decline. On one hand, when you have already passed into a sharp fertility decline at 27, it doesn’t quite phase you the same way to think about the fertility nose-dive you’ll be taking in a year. On the other hand, it is impossible to be a woman and not see “35” in red, flashing numbers. Ad la*–life has to keep happening.

If you were looking for a reason to eat a large chunk of cake this afternoon, you can always say that you’re doing it in honour of my birthday. And it was simply an obligation that you had to fulfill in order to be polite. And since I am a birthday month rather than just a birthday day sort of person, feel free to use this excuse for the entire month of June. I know I will.

I still have more people to add to Show and Tell, but Blogger is being wonky for a moment so it may need to wait for an hour or two–it took a long time to get it up and running this morning. And feel free to keep coming up in front of the class and showing your item. I am deeply in love with Show and Tell. Even when I post something new after the Show and Tell post, it’s still open though Tuesday-ish or beyond. It’s just that once it gets to Tuesday, you may want to hold over your post for the Show and Tell the next weekend.

* “Oh well” in Hebrew

All things of wonder can happen on your birthday. You can randomly choose a bug spray off the shelf at the local CVS on your way to the hike and discover once you smell it that it is the same brand of bug spray you borrowed 24 years ago on a beach camping trip that you’ve been looking for ever since because you loved the memories tied to the smell. I have been sniffing my arm all afternoon and thinking about these huge, empty horseshoe crab shells we found near the campsite.

We spent the morning on the Potomac River. It is my favourite body of water in this world. I know many people cannot imagine being so incredibly attached to a body of water, but when I read Impossible Vacation by Spaulding Gray and he described how his mother went insane after his father scoffed at her attachment to Narragansett Bay and moved her away from the water, I marked the page with a little scrap of paper because that is exactly the same attachment I feel to the Potomac River.

In the same week when I have been panicking over the idea of sending off my son to speech therapy once a week, I found myself wistfully wishing that they were old enough to take white water rafting. I’m not sure what age specialists would recommend taking a child white water rafting, but I’m going to wager a guess that it isn’t two-years-old. But as we were standing at the overlook watching this screaming rapid, I told my daughter when she was older, we would ride over the rapids in the Potomac River–albeit further down river in West Virginia where the water is calmer. And then I thought to myself, “will I have the energy and wherewithal to go white water rafting by the time she is ready to go white water rafting?” It’s this bizarre race where I am ready now, but she is too little. And when she is ready, there will be this small window before I am too old. It feels like I’m standing at the edge of a game of double dutch, trying to perfectly time the moment I jump between the ropes.

Before we started the hike, we gave the twins the option of using the stroller even though I wasn’t certain our stroller would do well on the tow path or walkway to Olmstead Island. Of course they they turned it down. They did fine on the walk out to the island, but asked to be carried on the walk back. I pointed out that they had been given the option to use the stroller. My daughter said simply about her current state of exhaustion and the length of the walk, “but I didn’t know.” That was enough to get her a free ride back to the car in my arms. Because it’s so true. You just don’t know. And you can’t be blamed when you need to change your mind.

I took over twenty pictures of the two of them walking hand-in-hand. I wish I had a best friend who had been with me since in-utero.

I have sort of been dreading tomorrow all year. Today is my last day being on the correct side of the thirty-divide. Tomorrow, I will be 35-years-old.

Every once in a while this year, the fact that I was almost 35 would float into my mind. It was the age you always read about in books in regards to fertility. The age where fertility falls off the cliff, where chromosomal abnormalities go up, where miscarriage rates increase. On one hand, it feels really silly to look at 35 as this big, flashing red number when you had high FSH at 27 and implantation issues. But just as I can’t dismiss the half hour after eating in regards to swimming or the eight hours in regards to sleep or the five-second-rule, I can’t erase that this number is also ingrained in my head as a warning, a threshold, a no-going-back point.

Gulp.

Me, still 34 this past weekend, talking to the ChickieNob off-camera

Okay, so good things that happened this year: the twins started school and I survived (oh, and they survived too). I finished writing Navigating the Land of If and it came out. I wrote my first chicklit book. I finally got to see Smith Island after being in love with it for many years. I continued to be mushy-in-love with Josh. I went to BlogHer, my first conference ever. And I aged one more year and I aged one more year and I aged one more year, and while that may not seem like a large accomplishment, we are all too keenly aware of the alternative. So a year should be celebrated.

I was about to list sad things that happened this year, but fuck that. Not every post needs to be symmetrical. It’s my birthday tomorrow. Let’s celebrate instead.

Showing off the manicure that I got over the weekend. I look like an adult!

And yes, the red nail polish means that I chose the red bag…

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Happy Christmas or Merry Christmas? I grew up hearing Merry Christmas, but Josh thinks that Happy Christmas sounds softer, like merry is a command (be merry) and happy is a hope (hope it’s a happy day). That may not be linguistically true, though it goes hand-in-hand with things like happy birthday, which is more about hoping the person is having a good day rather than commanding them to feel a certain way. (As in, I hope you had a happy birthday.) Happy or merry?

And how are you spending today?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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Just when I think that social media has ceased to be social, people peek out to say happy birthday, or discuss an article, or reminisce about college. A friend posted a story that sent all of us down a rabbit hole of connected stories and people who have drifted away (whatever happened to them?). Suddenly, it felt like we were all hanging out in someone’s living room, tossing out facts so someone could pull them together into a cohesive memory.

I love that you can’t write it off. That social media keeps popping back up and reminding you that it can be anything we want it to be. We just have to make it happen.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.