A Quarter of a Century

Yup - it's true - I'm 25 years old!  I played my first soccer game over 21 years ago, I've been graduated from high school for 7 years (seriously?!), married for 3 & 1/2 years, and yet...I am still dealing with acne.  Where is the justice I ask you?!  My Mom totally lied when she said I'd grow out of it by the time I was in college.  

Anyway, is it weird that I am still so young and yet I feel so old physically?  I can't decide if it's just because having a baby totally destroys your body or if this is the normal trend.  I feel like every few weeks I'm dealing with weird pains that I've never felt before and that disappear as suddenly as they come.  And we live a pretty active lifestyle - I shudder to think where I'll be in another 25 years at this rate.

But anyway, this is not about my acne or my aching body.  This is about MY BIRTHDAY!  Which was a weird mixture of highs and lows.  Daphne and I had an off morning and right as Burke was coming home for lunch the blender broke, showering me with spinach smoothie while Daphne simultaneously threw her stroganoff on the floor.  Not a happy moment.  But then in walks Burke and presents me with a lovely birthday surprise.  I can't remember if I've mentioned this on here or not, but Burke and I don't exactly have a great history of gift giving.  In fact, the past couple of years we have managed to get each other a wide variety of not-so-on-the-mark gifts.  However, I am very happy to report that my sweetheart totally nailed it this time with a homemade creation - MY FAVORITE!  Seriously, no sarcasm meant there at all.  Homemade gifts are my absolutely favorite kind to receive - it shows that the person really thought about you and took the time to make something that would be meaningful to you.

The past couple of nights Burke has been out in the side garage where I was strictly forbidden to enter. Little did I know my non-crafty hubby was busy painting and modge-podging circular wooden boxes to hold chocolates, girly nail polish, and a watch.  In a separate wooden box he printed some recent favorite pictures of Daphne to go on top and decorated it with paint and ribbons in my favorite color combinations - blue and brown of course.  When I opened this gift he first had me read a paper (keep in mind it's been the year of Harry Potter at our house - we're on the last book!) that told me about my wand (a stick from the tree out front - ha ha!) and how I could retrieve my memories from the "pensive" (in the HP books, the pensive is a place where you can store memories and then you can review them and invite other people to see your memories too) by putting the wand to my temple and retrieving a memory from the box.  I then pulled out the special box he had been working on and found inside dozens of slips of paper with a wide assortment of happy memories from our married life together.  I was delighted!  I alternated between crying and laughing as I read each one.  

This is so NOT a Burke gift and so entirely an Emily gift!  I am not a high maintenance woman.  I don't require flowers, fancy clothes, expensive jewelry or any "thing" really.  Instead, I am extremely sentimental.  I put a lot of store in "moments" and memories.  I think that's why I love to take pictures and blog so much because it marks that moment in time for me to go back and enjoy often.  Burke, on the other hand, loves a good toy when it comes to gift giving and (as I have discovered) does not think pictures are good gifts at all! :)  These are some of the little things you learn as you grow together in marriage.  And that is why it meant so much to me that Burke had tried so hard and succeeded so completely in speaking my love language.  I will definitely remember this gift for a long time to come.