(Time to read: ~ 6 minutes)
Some people enjoy having large birthday parties, but they’ve not been as satisfying for me as the opportunity to meet with just one or two of my friends or family at a time. So my pattern has been to have several birthday celebrations each year.
Mom, Dad and John
This year my celebrations began with a birthday lunch with Mom, Dad and John at the Red Lobster on Bay Street.
I was happy that I had some presents to give Mom and Dad, including some very comfortable cotton socks I have found that don’t leave lines on your legs (Sim-Can), and some things I found at The Container Store in New York. For Dad I had found a hanger that holds multiple baseball caps, to help organize at least some of his collection (this seems to have been a big hit). For Mom I had gotten one of those purse hangers that sits on the table at a restaurant and keeps your purse off the ground.
And I very much appreciated the presents that Mom and Dad had brought me, including several packages of gluten-free shortbread with cherry bits on top from the Kawartha Bakery, and some more lovely stories recorded for me by Mom, including the latest China Bayles story by Susan Wittig Albert (Mourning Gloria) and the latest Meg Langslow story by Donna Andrews (The Real Macaw), as well as some she had transferred over from cassette recordings, including several Emma Lathen stories. And that they continued with the gift arrangement I had requested quite a number of years ago now – that they take the amount of money they would have spent on birthday and Christmas presents for me, divide it by 12, and give me a cheque a month for that amount that I can uses to by myself a treat. So they also gave me the 6 birthday cheques under this arrangement.
And the food was lovely. I had a double batch of their garlic shrimp (my favourite) with broccoli and two of their biscuits (a rare gluten treat), a salad, and John and I shared a cup of their clam chowder. For dessert we all had some of the gluten-free shortbread that Mom and Dad had brought. And then the waitress took a photograph of the four of us together on Mom and Dad’s camera.
Birthday Massage
Several years ago the highlight of my birthday was a very special massage with an fellow NVC practitioner, Valerie Moysey. We’ve been trying to schedule another session since then, and it finally happened just before this birthday. I deeply appreciated John’s support in making this a very special event.
He agreed to have the massage happen in his unit upstairs, and he met Valerie at the loading dock and helped her to bring her table and supplies upstairs. He had also made the bed with clean sheets for the nap I hoped to have afterward.
My legs, hips and lower back have all been very tight lately, so Valerie focused on those areas. The sun streamed in the window and the sound of waves flowed from the player Valerie had brought. It was an amazing and relaxing experience.
Days Away
One of the things my parents discovered was that it was much easier for my Dad to relax and take time off when he was away from home. And I seem to be very much the same. When I’m at home it’s hard not to just fall into the usual patterns, or to work on the work projects that I’ve been wanting to get done for a while.
So I knew that I wanted to get away somewhere quiet and peaceful for three days for my birthday. One of the complications in doing this is that my birthday is typically just before or on the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend.
I had intended to ask friends for their recommendations of places, but the end of the summer came around and it had not happened. I mentioned my frustration at myself to John and he generously offered to do some research to find a place, which would be his present to me.
Because we had started so late, most places were already full. He finally found a place and encouraged me to check out the photos on their website. One of the things that was most important to me was to be able to sit at a window and look out at a lake. But none of the photographs of this cabin showed anything like this. I called the place to enquire and was told that I could see a bit of the lake if I stood in a particular corner of the bedroom. John cancelled our booking.
I suggested that we might have more luck if we tried midweek the week before that weekend. My birthday this year was on Friday, so it could be the highlight of a three-day getaway. With this information, John proposed that we go to his family’s cottage (which is generally full of people on the Thanksgiving weekend, which is why it hadn’t been on our list before). I find this place very beautiful, so it sounded like the perfect solution.
John called around to check with his family whether anyone else was planning to be there, or if we could have the time. Everyone else was expecting to be involved elsewhere.
One wrinkle was that I was scheduled to supervise the first practice group of one of my apprentices on Tuesday evening, and I really wanted to have three full days alone with John at the Point. (I later realized that being there on Wednesday was so important to me because I was born on a Wednesday.) John said that he would be willing to drive us up on Tuesday night after the practice group, which I very much appreciated.
With this information, I set myself what is for me a major challenge. To be all packed and ready to go before my massage with Valerie on Tuesday afternoon. To do this and to honour my commitments to my clients meant starting to pack first thing on Monday morning. This was more difficult than sometimes because I had spent the weekend working on learning WordPress in order to create a new website (www.glendamattinson.com) that would integrate key information from four other sites (www.compassionatehonesty.com, www.connectinghonesty.com, www.talk-it-thru.com, and www.glendasnotes.com) and make it much easier to blog (the previous software I’d been using kept crashing and deleting my blog posts).
But I disciplined myself to put the website work away on Monday morning and get started. And I achieved my goal. By the time I went upstairs to enjoy my massage everything except the food in my fridge was packed – even my computer! And I had even checked the the fridge food would fit easily in my cooler bag.
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