35!

If you continue to read this you will see that I started this post much earlier in the week, but for many reasons a crazy week and wanting a little more perspective being the biggest reasons, I never finished.

Here is where I started:

On Friday I will celebrate my 35th birthday and that seems old to me. For the first time, I feel like I am getting old. It is not the gray hair, that has been there for years. It is not even the wrinkles that are starting to form around my eyes. I think what is making me feel old is that my baby turned 5 today. I am the mother of an 8 yr old, a 7 year old and a 5 year old...that cannot be! Where did the time go? It is hard to believe that at 24 people so many people told me I was too young to get married and at 29 when I told my husband that we had to have ONE more baby before I was 30 and too old to have them:) Now I am happy that I got married at 24 and had three kids before I was 30. I am not sure I would be able to be starting my family now. I fell old with an 8,7 & 5 year old, I could not imagine having a newborn now.

I know that the way I planned out my life doesn't work for everyone, and I know how lucky I am to have found the *man of my dreams* at 15
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Now it is Saturday morning and I AM 35. And as I suspected, I feel no different today then I did on Thursday. I got alot of feed-back from friends when I expressed my concerns about 35 and most of what they said was good and did help clarify what I was feeling. 35 is just a number. The only reason this birthday hit me with a reality check is that it was a "5" and the "5" and the "0" birthday's tend to make me stop and think about where I my life has gone since the last "perspective" birthday:) So, I spent way to much of my time reliving the last five years. What I found was that I did not have all the huge moments that I had in the 5 years before, but that doesn't mean that I have done nothing. And what I have done has been good. A college degree, 3 monsters moved from babies/toddlers to kids, traded Mom's club in for PTO, enrolled in a Masters program, and really grew in my marriage. Looking at it, I see that I have done "stuff" over the last 5 years, important stuff. Stuff that will set the stage for the next 5 years.

35 is not so bad thus far. And it looks alot better now than it did on Monday:)