My 30th-Best Yet. We are all created to be different.

In our house we like to call it your birthday weekend, where you get to have a whole weekend to celebrate your birthday.

My 30th birthday weekend started like this, Saturday morning I got to sleep in and when I got up and came downstairs there were flower and gifts waiting for me. From there Nathan, Zachary and I went to Zach’s friends bday party. We stayed there for about an hour then I got dropped off at a spa to have a manicure and pedicure, which was wonderful by the way. I was picked up from there and brought home to pick up my gift cards to go shopping for as long as I wanted! After shopping for a few hours I came home and we got ready to leave for our close friends annual Jimmy Buffett party. It was a full day and I loved it.

Sunday Nathan arranged for me to go with my best friend, to look at her wedding photos (she just got married this summer), I knew I needed to be back by 2:45pm or so to get to my parents house by 3pm to have dinner and cake to celebrate mine and my brothers birthdays as a family. When I got home around 2:45 it all made sense why Nathan had been acting so strange and my house was so clean this weekend, my house was filled with all my family and friends!!!

Nathan didn’t miss a thing and with help from my family and friends every detail was covered. There was my favorite food; burritos and they called them REN-I-TOS. Chocolate Martinis, called CHOC-NAY-TINIS. My favorite wines that he made labels for and called REN-EE-SLING. Chips and salsa from Chili’s. Snack-mix, and the most AMAZING cake ever made by my friend Jess.

There were poster boards filled with pictures of me and timelines about what happened the year I was born. People took a quiz about me, wrote funny memories of me and made silly comments about pictures of me. Nathan also created a “mixed tape”/play-list for my iPod, it was 2 of the top songs every year from 1980-now. It was so much fun to hear the evolution of music. Nathan also arranged for everyone to get me the gifts I really wanted!!! I absolutely loved my weekend it was amazing and I could not have planned it better.

This weekend really did open my eyes to so much. I got to see how loved I am, first by my husband, then my family, and all of my friends. One of the things that jumped out at me about my party was, as I have gotten older I have come to realize that a small quality group of friends means so much more than being popular. I may have not had 100’s of people at my party but all the people that mean something to me (and could make it) where there and that means more to me than any large number of people could.

I also learned that we all see our journey through life differently. One of the things Nathan had people do was write down memories about me, they then read them out loud to me. It was interesting to see how people saw me and what memories stuck with them. I couldn’t even remember some of the things people wrote about me, which opened my eyes to how differently we all see life.

We were all created to be uniquely different in so many ways; none of us are the same. The world may look at our kiddos and see something visibly different but they really are no different than you or I. Just because people may look, move, sound or act like each other doesn’t mean they are, we were all made to bring praise, glory and honor to God in a way that the person next to us never could. We need to remember and know this to be true about our children weather or not they can walk, talk or feed themselves. Our children bring praise, glory, honor and joy to others and to God in ways we will never fully understand.