My husband's happy birthday day

Well, I'm now married to a sixty year old man...impossible! That's what one gets when one marries an older man. Just as I'm getting used to turning a new "decade"...he turns the next. We met just days after I graduated from high school, I think I was still seventeen (at least for a few weeks as I have a July birthday).

He had dropped a class while an undergrad and found out he was being drafted (you had to take a certain amount of classes back then to stay out of the draft and he didn't even consider that). So...he enlisted instead and spent a couple tours of duty in Viet Nam. I'm sure our children are happy he dropped that class.

By the time we met, he had survived the war and returned to college to finish his undergrad degree and was beginning his Master's. He was a twenty-five year old grad student, a friend of some of the guys I knew in the Jesus People style coffee house where I "worked" in ministry on weekends. We became very good friends during that time. Later we realized we realized God was leading us towards marriage. We wed days after I turned twenty...he had already been twenty-seven for quite awhile. I guess it's working, having been married thirty-two years now.

In our family, we don't spend a lot on birthday presents as such. Instead the person becomes king or queen for the day. So...for his birthday, he received oatmeal for breakfast (no kidding, that's what he requested), an oatmeal cake ( do we see a pattern here, isn't it Bert on Sesame Street that loves oatmeal, too), he got to attend his favorite college team's skirmish on campus, he and I had a late lunch at his favorite root beer drive-in and we didn't even think of the nitrates in the cony dogs, and this evening the three of us are having a homemade meal of roast beef and mushroom gravy, mashed potatoes, and salad (along with that oatmeal cake). He received a wonderfully sappy card from his "little girl" as well as other birthday wishes from family and friends...it has been a good day. My birthday present is to help him do some lawn work soon.

While he was at the football game, I drove to the county library to pick up a book I had on hold. I can hardly WAIT to read the new Laura Childs' Tea Shop Mystery called Dragonwell Dead. I love that series of books. I had recently put it on hold from my home computer and I had an e-mail from the library saying it was in this morning...isn't technology grand?

While at the library, I looked for the January edition of Country Living, which has an article by Alexandra Stoddard (found it...checked it out) as well as last month's issue which has an article about collecting wire chickens (it was already checked out). I spent some time perusing the DVDs and brought home Ladies in Lavender, Rosemary & Thyme's first two episodes, and a DVD called Summer's Lease Volumes 1 & 2 (with John Gielgud as the star)...I haven't heard about it but it looks lovely...we'll see.

Now it's time to do that lawn work which I promised my husband. If I help pick up all of the branches fallen from trees and other "stuff" on our lawn, he can run the lawnmower early this evening. It's almost 80 degrees here today, hard to believe it snowed all day last Saturday!