Thirty, Flirty, and Thriving

Well, the thirty part is correct. The funny thing is, I don't feel 30. Age isn't anything but a number I guess.

I had a great time celebrating my birthday with family over the weekend. My mom invited us over for lunch, cake, and presents on Saturday. My sister and her husband were there, along with my stepsister and her kids. Then on Sunday, Gregg's family had us for lunch and whatnot. Monday, my actual birthday, turned out to be a nice day even though thunderstorms had been forecasted. Gregg bought me sunflowers (my favorite flower) and took me out to the Macaroni Grill. We brought Colton with us to dinner, and he was really good until about the last 20 minutes of our meal when he started getting cranky. I fed him shortly before we left the house and packed plenty of toys, juice, and snacks so he wouldn't have a meltdown in the middle of the restaurant. Our waiter mistook Colton for a girl, even though he was wearing a blue shirt, a blue bib, and had a blue pacifier in his mouth!

So turning another year and really another decade older aside, life is going pretty well. I am dealing with the daily challenges of caring for an almost-toddler. The temper tantrums have begun. Granted, they're still short lived and don't involve throwing himself dramatically on the floor at this point, but it's definitely a precursor of what is to come. And I'm not looking forward to it. Colton is testing his boundaries and enjoying the new freedom that comes with being able to crawl at lightning speed. He frequently goes for one of the dog's toys, her food/water dishes, the air conditioning vent in the living room, or the end table drawers in which he finds all sorts of interesting treasures. We finally locked up all the kitchen cabinets so that's some sort of relief.

Colton's down to only one bottle a day now, in the morning right after he wakes up. I've been mixing in a little bit of whole milk with his formula to get him used to the taste and will gradually add more until he's completely on regular milk. He seems to be doing well with it so far. We're still planning on throwing his birthday party August 16, but we are having a difficult time figuring out where to have it. Our condo is really too small to accommodate the 20 guests we're inviting, and we don't have our own backyard here. We basically share a piece of grass with three other neighbors. We've considered holding the party at our development's clubhouse, but aren't sure we want to pay what they charge to rent it out. And since we're now at the mercy of the condo association's rules, I had to call and ask them if we were allowed to do 50 different things just to have a simple child's b-day party!

Now we have less than three weeks to decide where we're having this, so yesterday I started calling up several parks in the area to ask if they reserve picnic shelters. I also went to some websites and was able to get more information that way. I searched in three different counties, and actually came across a state park nearby that has a reservable picnic shelter and doesn't charge an entrance fee. We're going to check out the spot this Saturday, and hopefully it's nice and we can book it and just be done with this whole thing already!! I didn't think it would be this much work finding a place to hold a 1 year old's birthday. Oy vey.

Much like what I did with my park search, I looked up a list of churches in our county and cut & pasted their names into Yahoo's search engine to see if they had a website. Then I compiled my own list on our computer with each place, their service times, address, and website. So come this Sunday, we can (I hate saying this) start checking churches off the list. It seems crazy to me that for the last year and a half, we've been without a place to worship. It also seems crazy that I've come to the point where I'm essentially tracking down churches to visit in an effort to find one where we'll want to belong. They should really do more advertising! They are in the business of rescuing souls, after all.