Matthew's Ninth Birthday

Our snowball bush, which is generally in full-bloom around the time of Matthew's birthday

This year was a little different as we celebrated our baby's birthday. His birthday is May 5th, and that date has stayed miraculously uncluttered pretty much every single year, until now. Bitty was in her Charlie Brown show on May 5th and 6th, and we knew we just had to postpone our annual Preslar family holiday. That was ok. It would have been really hard for me to do that the first few years, but it really was ok. Troy said it best when he asked what better way could we possibly have of celebrating Matthew's birthday than by gathering together to celebrate another one of our children. I totally agreed. It was an extremely busy day; opening night of the show, dress rehearsal after school, barely enough time for dinner in between. It was delightful to watch Bitty in her play, and afterwards Morris and Carol came over for an ice cream cake and reminiscing. It was a great day.

We waited until Saturday to have our quiet family celebration - it was on a bit of a smaller scale this year.  We were all a bit tired and cold, so we decided against a picnic dinner.  But we did go get our customary balloons, and drove as always to our favorite park above the Capitol building.  Why does no one ever go there?  It's always completely empty! Maybe on warmer nights it's packed, but never when we're there.

We gathered together and wrote our notes to our boy. I had been feeling so very rushed up until this point, and I'm grateful that the repetition of this tradition helped me feel more centered, like I really was able to truly reflect, ponder and feel.  That's all I wanted.  Very peaceful, for all of us I think.  And this year there were no balloon disasters.

After we bid our balloons farewell, we decided to use the rest of the evening, the night before mother's day. to pay a visit to our friend who is dealing with sad family trials.  And it turned out that our visit was much needed and appreciated - I'm so glad we spent some Matthew-Day time giving love to a friend. Filled the day with an extra measure of warmth.