Grab Bag: Happy Birthday From The 2000 Phillies

This post is part of a sort of "blog hop" series that hope to contribute to semi-regularly -- The Grab Bag: Writing Prompts for Bogged-Down Bloggers. Of course, I don't normally have trouble coming up with something to write about as long as I have pictures, but when I don't ... well, that's the trouble. So I am really excited about having some kind of starting point, at least, for not-necessarily-kid-related blog posts, since I'm all out of pictures for the week (and anyway, I'm kind of getting tired of using them as a crutch {which of course I just originally typed as "crotch" because OF COURSE I DID, durr}). The "theme" for Week 1 is "Memorable Birthdays" (paraphrased, of course -- more details at the link). Feel free to join in, if you want; add a link to your post in the comments over on Dancing Lemur's blog, and then browse everyone else's contributions as they come aboard.

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We're not really birthday people in my family. I mean, we have birthdays, because everybody has birthdays, but we've never really been the sort to throw giant parties just because we could. We'd have family and a few friends over for cake and ice cream, and of course we got cards and gifts and flowers and special dinners and stuff, but birthdays have pretty much usually been low-key affairs.

When I graduated from college and got a full-time job, I started making a habit of taking a vacation day for my birthday. I mean really, who wants to get up at the ass-crack of dawn so they can go into a cube farm and forcibly socialize with people they don't like very much on their birthday, when they'd rather being doing literally anything else, including laundry? Not me.

The year I turned 26, my parents wanted to do something extra-special for my birthday, so they treated my husband and me to an afternoon Phillies game. The weather was gorgeous, as luckily it often is in this part of the country in early May, and that early in the baseball season, even the Vet was lovely. It was a businesspersons' special, an early afternoon game, so I basically got to spend the entire day with my three favorite people in the world (my husband and my parents, plus my sister and a couple of her friends from Princeton). My name appeared on the Phan-a-vision in giant letters, and I freaked out slightly because the entire City of Philadelphia saw how old I was, and I got a free cap, and an entire baseball stadium sang "Happy Birthday" to me and I got confetti thrown in my hair by total strangers.

It was, in a word, amazing.