33

Today is my 33rd birthday. I couldn't be more fine with it either. I really feel like age is just a number. Youth is a state of mind I think. I feel great at this point in my life. My kids are growing up and seem more manageable, my relationship with my husband is terrific, I have a beautiful home, my husband is gainfully employed. I have wonderful friends and family and I am healthy and strong, I physically feel so great. My back is an issue at times but I think I have at least found out how to manage that so the pain lasts only a week or so rather than months. I am blessed in so many ways. It is easy sometimes to whine about the wrongs and the bad things but I try not to do that. I, of course, am human and I do. I bounce back rather quickly and try to focus on positives. I feel like I have accomplished a lot over the past few years. I have maintained my weight loss for a little over a year and I am so proud of myself for that. It is still a daily struggle for me to eat right but working out has become my friend. I really love it, even crave it. I have come along way since December 2006. This was me on my 31st birthday. I am just so happy not to have changed this person into someone I can be proud of. It is not the way I looked, although I am not thrilled with that, but the way that I felt about myself, about my life, about my complacency. All of it. I was just not in a good place and it showed on the outside in the form of weight. I am happy that I was able to take back my control and pull myself up by the boot straps, so to speak, to get my head right. I am unbelievably blessed in my life and recognize that the Lord has been kind in so many ways.

I also have been so sad that it has been so warm and un-Christmas-y around here and I desperately wanted some snow! I was thrilled to see that I received a wonderful birthday gift of snow! It has been snowing all day and is covering the ground. I am sitting here listening to one of my absolute favorite Christmas CD's Sarah McLachlan's Wintersong and the sounds of my children playing together with snow softly falling outside! Who could ask for more?