Day 7--A Photo That Makes Me Happy

Happy 30th Birthday to me!

I really thought about this one. Since we entered the digital age late, we have no pictures from the first few years of our marriage on the computer. Or anywhere except for boxes and photo albums. And really, I'm no scanning whiz, so there they will stay.

Anyway, I chose two photos for today's post. The first one is obviously me next a ginormous cake. C really outdid himself for my 30th birthday a few years back. he had a huge surprise party for me at this cool shop on Elmwood, called Delish. It's a bakery and a cooking school. He rented out the part where classes are held, and my best friend, Mo, tricked me into thinking we were going there for class. When we showed up, all my friends and family were there. It was a pretty awesome night.

I think my adult life truly started at 30. I looked critically at what I was doing, where I was going, what I wanted. I kicked old, stupid habits to the curb for good (goodbye, binge drinking!) and started to focus on important things. My birthday is in February, and by this point C and I had been married for 2 and a half years. We had travelled quite a bit independently and together, remodeled our cute North Buffalo home to a comfortable point, enjoyed going out to dinner, had both completed marathons and half marathons and numerous other races. But we still weren't at the point where we were sure we wanted to have kids. We did, however, already have our dog and 2 cats.

By May I knew it was baby time---it suddenly clicked.

But we had another trip planned--this time to Paris that summer. It was my 30th birthday present, in a way, and we decided we'd start the baby-making process when we got back (TMI, I know. But hang in there).  And just a few months later, WHA-BAM, I was pregnant with E.

That Paris trip was one of my favorites. It was riddled with disaster, mind you. It took us 2 days and an overnight in both JFK and Reykjavic airports to get there. We got supremely lost while sleep deprived hours after settling into our apartment. C ended the trip with debilitating food poisoning, during which I may or may not have taken advantage of his incapacitation to shop solo for an entire day. (He needed an IV when we returned, as he'd tried to dehydrate himself for the trip home. It was ugly.)

But despite all those hurdles, we really had fun. We ate like crazy, drank lots of wine, walked, shopped, spoke French exclusively (me, not so much C). Every day started with pain au chocolat and a noisette for me, croissant and cafe for C. Oh, it was decadent.

A sort of adieu to our unattached, child-free existence. It was a fantastic send-off.

The picture below is of me, obvs, at a wonderful cafe in the Marais, right around the corner from the Picasso Museum. I'd been shopping while C was resting. He surprised me with flowers when we met up, and we proceeded to have an amazing lunch, ending with chocolate crepes. The likes of which I'd never before tasted, and have never since. Magic. Afterwards, as we made our way back to our apartment, we shopped for C, and I learned the word for cufflinks: boutons de manchette.

We got a kick and a cough out of the dude next to us. And we thought about all the times we must have been inadvertently featured in random people's vacation pictures. Makes the world seem a little smaller, and again, magical.

Ah, 30. You were a good year.

Dude, your cigarette. Blech.