Happy First Birthday to the Twins! :) It's amazing that the time's gone by so fast. I set my alarm to get up by 6 o'clock to go out to the grocery to get cake mix for cupcakes for the daycare (a tradition i want to start for the kids when they have birthdays), but someone (probably a rogue kiddo!) turned down the volume on my alarm clock and i never heard it go off. so, cupcakes will have to wait for tomorrow. oh, well.....

the girlfriend whose daughter i watch (the one who brings me payments of the mint chocolate milkshakes, as i refuse to take much money from her for like two or three hours of letting her kid entertain the rest of the kids...hehe) got the twins birthday hats. one says 'birthday princess', and is light pink with feathery-type stuff on it. too cute, and i can't wait to get pics of that! the other isn't quite as cute, but is still a lot of fun (i mean, how can you top the birthday princess??). it is something like a top hat with pom-poms around the base (instead of a brim). it has 'birthday boy' on it, with some resin sports balls around the top. very cute.

my mother-in-law has a tradition of telling the kids their birthday story. every year she tells them about giving birth to them. it's really funny. i can't remember specifics of aaron's birth, but i do remember the fourteen hour labor she had with him! how can one forget details like that?! hehe i say this, because i think of telling the twins their birth story. what a story!

in this time of year, i suppose i will always have a measure of reflection of life's blessings. granted, the cookie crumbles, and the crumbs have a tendency to make a big mess, but sometimes you have to think of it as "hell, it's still a cookie.....pass the milk!!" yes, you get the times where the cookie is so crumbled, you don't think you'll be able to eat it. but then, after you've finished scraping up the crumbles and eating them (of course!), you pick yourself up, head to the store, and buy all the shit that it takes to make a fresh batch. and you know what.....they taste even better than the first one.

this is kind of like how my life is going right now. i'm blessed with what i have, and know this, even if i don't always express it. it's so much easier to express the negative in life, isn't it? i should make it a goal to let the positive expressions of what i think about my life overshadow the negative.