Special Birthdays

Our lovely Erica sketched and coloured this gorgeous card for me earlier on this year when I had a special birthday. To celebrate we went out for a nice dinner with our kids. I considered that to be a suitably low key way to mark the day - I am not a fan of a big fuss and am a bit averse to surprise parties but I did enjoy that our girls secretly organised a birthday cake for me and Pete did a beautiful impropmtu speech. All these special things gathered up together made for a perfect day and I was really touched. The cake was crafted by Amy's lovely friend Karen. I'm not sure if you can really see it in the photo but the 'lace' around the edge of the cake was pearly. She is a true artist.

Karen also made a cake for Amy's 21st Birthday Party which we went to last night. Pete and I sometimes can't believe that our baby girl is 21 and we don't know where all those years have gone. Other times we are just relieved to have got to this stage in the life of our family and wonder how we did it! We had had four daughters and our family was complete just before my 30th birthday. So that's the reason Amy and I end up celebrating our 'special birthdays' around a similar time. Milestones in family life are little opportunites to pause and reflect, give thanks to God and to savour that sense of heart-overflowing blessedness.

So we were the 'oldies' at Amy's birthday party but we did enjoy the beautiful 'young' people - they are so fun and interesting to chat to. The lovely cake-making Karen came especially to encourage Pete and I before she left - telling us what a lovely friend Amy was and what a good job of bringing her up we had done. Such things are very nice for parents to hear and we so appreciated that she took the time to do that. Our son-in-law Paul made Amy a 21st key which was also very thoughtful. People do sometimes moan about young people but personally I 'rate' them. I love their energy, creativity and freshness.