Growing on Me

You know you're getting old when your to do list includes one-liners like "bills" and "weed". And by weed, you mean of course the kind you pull, not smoke.

You know you're getting old when you tell your children that "all you want for your birthday is a clean house and good attitudes." (Thank you, Mother dearest. I finally understand why you said this every stinkin' year.) And tell me, children, why is it so hard to give your mother what she asks, hmm?

You know you're getting old when you spend all your birthday money to outsource your responsibilities. I splurged to hire my friend the Wild Weeding Woman. She's going to show up at my house next week to help me weed and cut back the perennials. (Hey, would you look at that? I know a real gardening word! I used that in the proper context all by myself! Aren't ya proud?). Oh, and I also splurged to hire a babysitter. I know. It's really too much excitement for one paragraph.

You know you're getting old when you wear yourself out just watching your children run rectangles in the driveway. Caed set up a course with four corners, using boogie boards and sidewalk chalk. Of course, Dani refused to fit her circled self into a rectangular race, and instead purposefully crashed her tricycle over and over. And laughed every time. Do you know how hard it is to crash a tricycle? Well, it's a piece of cake for Dani. She laid it out like a beach blanket.

You know you're getting old when things that happened yesterday actually happened five years ago.

You know you're getting old when you can't gaze at her eyes and not feel a tear coming on.

You know you're getting old when you find yourself happy in a wallflower, white noise, barely notice it kind of way.

Not wild screamy happy like the time your high school boyfriend (no longer yours and off to college) sent you a dozen red roses all the way from California for your Sweet 16. Or nearly falling off the cliff happy like the time the aforementioned high school boyfriend turned college boyfriend asked you to marry him in the shadow of Half Dome.

But messy, sweet kind of happy, like the time you shared a gorgeous view and the best morning buns in the entire universe with your family and then watched them running off the sugar buzz up and down and up the hill.

And if this is what it's like to grow older, well, then growing older is definitely growing on me.