Happy Birthday

I absolutely love birthdays. When I was younger my mom always made me feel so special on my birthday. She would ask me to give her a list of three things I wanted and she would buy me one of the items I told her. She would make me a cake then my dad, brother and sister would sing Happy Birthday. It wasn't that I received some extravagant gift, it was just the way she made each of us feel on our birthday. I like doing the same thing for other special people in my life. I want them to feel the way my mom made me feel, loved.
So begins the tradition of the birthday "week". Now I have to say that I didn't intend for this to happen but somehow it happens every year. My birthday isn't until Thursday, however my friend took me out today for sushi. Thursday the family will go out to dinner, Friday my dad is taking us out to lunch, and the following week I have another friend I'm meeting for a birthday lunch. I use to joke with the pilot that every year I would have a birthday week.
The best gifts are the thoughtful ones, the ones I know that my friends really thought about. At Christmas time I received one of the best gifts ever. When my friend came to visit, I tortured her by making her watch an episode of the Cowboys Cheerleaders. This is a show I watch every year with my son. Anyway for Christmas she had a magnet made especially for me that is a cowboys cheerleader with curly hair and hazel eyes. It made me laugh and it was perfect. Gifts are not about how much you can spend to impress somebody, they are about the thought. Really thinking about how someone will feel when they open it. Will they know you were thinking of them as you picked it out?
So here goes another year, another birthday, and another reason to eat lots of good food and yummy cake :-)