Today is my son’s 23rd birthday. It’s incredible how quickly time flies and just gets away from you when you’re not paying attention. It still feels like I was pacing around the office, taking my shoes off when I thought I could get away with it, wondering what I could do to induce labor and make him arrive sooner. You would have thought his due date had come and gone already, but he arrived almost two weeks early, just like his sister did 7 1/2 years earlier. I was anxious to meet him, get the pregnancy over with. It hadn’t been as easy as my first one, but still relatively (fortunately) uneventful. I went home from work on a Friday afternoon having already wrapped up to-do lists and prepared files for the person who would be covering for me when I went out on maternity leave. My mom had recently arrived and was going to stay through the early days after his arrival. Good thing she arrived early because he decided to make his entrance that night.
I haven’t been able to spend every birthday with him or celebrate with him each year, and I imagine as he gets older this will be even more likely. But last night we had a family gathering to celebrate his birthday and my daughter’s engagement (one year to go to the wedding!). I baked a red velvet cake from scratch, made pretzels again, cooked up some brats and potato salad, and stocked the fridge with drinks. I was in my element. I had both my kids with me, and our family is growing. My future son-in-law and his mother were there, as well as my son’s girlfriend, and my boyfriend too.
But the best part of the evening was when we split up into teams for a game of Mind the Gap. It was boys against girls, taking turns going around the board answering trivia questions centered around the last four generations. I was lucky that the other ladies on my team could answer the Millenial and Gen Z questions and we were able to come up with the victory. The Boomer questions were the hardest (how are we supposed to know what the “jellyroll” hairstyle was?). I’m glad we didn’t split up into teams based on our generations because that would have seriously handicapped us anytime we had to answer something outside of our own age group. With boys vs girls each team had someone from three of the four generations.
I didn’t take too many pictures last night. I was too busy being a part of the festivities (and serving up food). But I paused a couple times throughout the evening to just listen and take in the chatter and noise around me. We don’t get together often enough, but as we all parted ways late last night I was glad to hear “we should do this more often” coming from my guests. Guess now we need to make sure that yes, we will do this more often. Before time gets away from us completely, or fortune takes any of us in different directions and further away from each other.
