Welcome to Where Bloggers Live: 2025! Happy New Year! “Where Bloggers Live” started out kind of like HGTV’s “Celebrities at Home,” but…with bloggers! We all like to peek behind the scenes and see inside people’s homes, interests, and lives, so every month this wonderful  group of seven bloggers family of amazing women shares their work-spaces, homes, towns, and thoughts, with posts based on specific prompts. It’s been so interesting over the years to see the different ways each of us interpret the topics.

 60th birthday

I LOVE my birthday. I have always loved my birthday. I love celebrating my birthday. I am happy to congratulate myself for making another trip around the sun. Another Year That I Did Not Die! Go, Me!

Well, you’ve all heard the story of THE GREATEST GIFT THE WONDERFULEST GIFT (Norman Laura’s jumprope), which is always a funny memory.

My nicest “theme” birthday memory is when Katie was, I guess like 9-12 or so…I was working at the prostate cancer education center (I guess that was before you guys), and after school she would go to her best friend’s house across the street and would stay there til I got home from work. I paid the mom the going babysitting rate in the neighborhood, but it was priceless to me cuz I knew she’d get off the bus from school with Jesse and the mom would meet them at the stop. She’d have them do their homework, eat dinner, and practice their instruments…and by the time I got home (I guess she was there about 2.5 hours each day) all the parenting heavy-lfting had been done and I could just say “go play” or “let’s watch Gilmore Girls reruns in bed with ice cream” or whatever. Good Times.

Birthday pancakes, 2013

ANYWAY,  under the mom’s watchful eye, on my birthday, the girls would make signs and cards and “sneak into” our house for ribbons and streamers and other decorations (we were always well-stocked with party decorations, new and vintage), and go all out in decorating our front porch…so when I pulled in from work at 6pm, the girls would jump out from a hiding place shouting HAPPY BIRTHDAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!  And I would enter my house, not on a red carpet, but thru a curtain of balloons, bows, and streamers. I think once or twice they even made and decorated a birthday cake while still across the street, so we had that nice treat to share.

Those are sweet memories.

I think this was 2016 – 56th birthday – with Katie

But my single favorite birthday has to be…I think it would have been my 28-29th birthday…we had our house but we didn’t have Katie yet. Russell (the ex) asked what I wanted to do….and all I wanted was a nice day together, driving out east (the eastern end of Long Island is all farms and beaches and quaint little towns with shops and restaurants specializing in locally caught seafood. And junk shops.) So he said fine, we’ll drive out to Greenport for lunch, and on the way we’ll stop whereever you want and I’ll buy you whatever you want (knowing full well I was not going to drag him into a Mercedes dealership) for your birthday.

Katie sent birthday flowers to work 2014

So we set out out on our drive, it was sort of a cool grey day for September 5, but schools were back in session so the single lane roads headed out east were clear (not like in the summer when it can take hours and hours to get out there). We stopped at two or three “antique” shops….and I bought a LOT of dishes….some pretty white white ones (old) with like a bas relief floral/lace border…and some green and white transferware (before I even knew what transferware was or that I would spend the rest of my life lusting over it and collecting it). A LOT of dishes. For the grand total of $30. Ex made off like a bandit that day. But I was happy.

Then we continued driving past farms and vineyards, with the occasional detour turn to go down to little private beaches with gazillion dollar homes.

2015: a day out east with a friend

We ended up at a dark little bar on a main street in a fishing town…I had lobster bisque and a crispy fried crab sandwich. It was perfect. I was really happy.

Honestly, now that I think about it, I’m not sure if we were even married yet. We bought our first house in 1988 and married in 1989, so this could have been my last unmarried birthday. Either way, it was a good one.

My favorite birthday graphic

When we got home he asked what I wanted for dinner, nothing was prepared, but we could order delivery or go pick something up. As I was trying to decide, there was a knock on the door (and I don’t remember the order, but) and one of my sisters-in-law stood there with a birthday cake. Wow! What a great surprise! Come in! We were just about to order some dinner! And a few minutes later, another knock on the door (well, THAT’S weird) and it was one of my girlfriends with a bottle of champagne! Wow! Perfect! Birthday cake and champagne! What are the odds (I can be a little slow on the uptake at times)? Then my mother-in-law with chicken cutlets, and another friend with a salad, and before I knew it, we had a houseful of friends and family and a whole birthday dinner, complete with cake and champagne!

To this day, almost 40 years later, I still consider that to be the most well-executed birthday surprise in the history of birthday surprises! Certainly better than when I tried to throw my ex a surprise 30th birthday party and he was on the verge of divorcing me over my secretive phone calls and mystery meetings in the middle of the day. No joke. I think he’d actually spoken to a lawyer (or, at least, that’s what he told me). Jerk. Ha ha. The yin and yang of an ex-husband. Sometimes sweet and thoughtful. Sometimes a dumbass.

I THINK this was my 30th birthday…1990

I wish I had pictures from that day! There are probably pictures of the dishes somewhere…but at this point in my life I don’t know where ANY of my few belongings are. I mean, they’re at Katie’s house…but she reorganized the tubs and boxes of pictures and slides after I left so I can no longer say, “oh, the fruit basket lamp is wrapped in the pink mexican blanket at the bottom of the tub with the horizontal oil painting of the bridge over the river on top.” CUZ I DON’T KNOW.  I’ve got my work cut out for me this fall.

I’m going to look around my computer and see if I have ANY birthday pictures to share here. They won’t be from that day, but I don’t actually think there WERE any from that day (can you even??).

What’s your favorite birthday memory??

Take a look at my friends’ blogs as well, to see what their happiest birthdays were!

Daenel at Living Outside the Stacks
Em at Dust and Doghair
Iris at Iris’ Original Ramblings
Jodie at Jodie’s Touch of Style
Leslie at Once Upon a Time Happily Ever After
Sally at Within a World of My Own