and now, 40 years later...

Such a beautiful day, in all ways! Lovely cool breeze, partly cloudy skies. You want to be outside, you want to be inside with windows wide open. I wake up thinking again how lucky to be celebrating my older girl's birthday on this glorious beginning to late summer.

Because the younger family is staying at the farmhouse, my attention is focused on them as I get up not quite with the sunrise, but not too long after either. 

I do a quick dash to feed the animals. I clip just the obvious lilies on my path. I mean, what if the visitors see the wilted flower heads, right? Okay, I fuss about the gardens. You know that already!

Inside again, I have a task: bake muffins. Yes, I could just bake the "perfect blueberry" ones I did a few weeks back, or I could do two batches: one with blueberries and sour cherries in the other. It's a little more ambitious, but I have a helper after all!

Ed and I have a light breakfast once the muffins are baked. Someone has to taste the finished product!

 

 

 

And now it's time to take off for the birthday daughter's home. But first, a question for you, little Primrose -- which one is your favorite flower??

I'm thinking the kids all are expressing their color preferences, no? Primrose is big on purple.

 

At my daughter's home (she is forty today!), we set up brunch foods outside on her deck. Another family gathering!

 

 

And of course, it's luxuriously wonderful! The kids flit in and out, sometimes I follow them, other times I linger on the deck to catch up with my older girls...

It's one of those protracted meals that you could stay with forever. Well, okay, maybe not forever, but for a long long time.

Before everyone scatters, I want that photo. Of course I do. Of the kids...

And this one, of all of them in my lap. 

And then it's time to say good bye to the younger family which is never easy, but there is so much good feeling from this weekend that I'm loaded with their presence. I'm satiated. For a little while anyway.

 

Toward evening, there is yet another birthday event  -- this one with friends and colleagues. The kids wanted wanted to make an appearance and we watched people come and go, some of them former colleagues of mine, so that was fun, and there was a cake and more singing..

And then the kids took off to visit their babysitter and I drove home to the quiet of the farmette where I can take the time to review the weekend in my head and, in my most self-indulgent hour, review all those parental milestones and now grandparental milestones that make up family life. I don't go back in time very often, but today -- well, I do, because you know, when your sweet little girl is forty years old, you want to think back to when she was just one day old, or maybe three years old (when her sister was born), or maybe when she was a teenager, away at music camp...

 

Or turning twenty or thirty, and now forty years old.

Yes, it's a beautiful day to be a parent. Happy birthday sweet little S (often called just that by me in real life). Happy, happy birthday!

with so much love...