Today is my daughter’s birthday. Hey, the first birthday in our family of 2009! Happy Birthday Brooke! Sadly it’s another birthday that I won’t get to share with her, other than through email because she is still many miles away on foreign soil. I haven’t even sent her birthday card yet. What a bad Mom I am. I bought something for her online recently and am waiting to send her birthday package until this item arrives. Guess what. I am still waiting for it to arrive. So instead of putting her birthday check in her package I gave her my credit card number to buy what she wants. It’s not the same though. I am mad that certain vendors won’t send to APO addresses and can’t ship their packages in a timely manner.

If she were here, instead of on an Army base in Germany, I would firstly take her out for a nice lunch to her choice of place. Maybe the Cheesecake Factory. Then I would take her to Baker’s Shoes in the mall and let her buy one pair of shoes. She would then spend four hours trying to narrow her choice down to just one pair. (An impossible decision for a shoe-a-holic such as herself). After that we would go to Target or Kohl’s where I would buy her an outfit for her special day. That night we would all go out to dinner somewhere fun like maybe Jasmine Thai. Then back home for ice cream cake from Baskin Robbins and presents. That is the day I would want to give to her if she were stateside today.



Yes, I would rise above the fact that 20-some years ago I was laying in a hospital bed in dire pain, after a doctor had broken my water with a thing that looked like a huge crochet hook. (Honest, it did). Eight hours later, at the stroke of eleven pm, out she popped. It was right during the shift change so I had two sets of nurses assisting the doctor. Set #1 didn’t want to leave until she was born and set #2 was there and ready to start work.

I would even rise above the fact that being pregnant with my precious girl triggered gallbladder attacks to occur after she was born. So when she was two months old I went in for the old fashioned gallbladder removal. Not the new kind they do today where you have a tiny little incision. No, I had the old fashioned kind where they cut you from stem to stern. I was in the hospital for ten days after that operation. I couldn’t get Brooke to drink from a bottle so she stayed with one of my friends who had given birth to a son a couple of months before Brooke was born. Do you know where I’m going with this? Yup, my friend nursed Brooke. She had her son on one boob and Brooke on the other. For two solid weeks! I guess when you are a baby you don’t care where your boob comes from as long as you get a boob. Or, “ninny” as we called it in our family. Then in waltzes my grandma and she gets Brooke to take the bottle. There was still boob involved however, in that she would rock Brooke and sing her the “booby song.” The booby song is sung to the tune of that old gospel song “As we gather at the river” and is merely the word boob or booby. For instance:
“Booby booby, booby booby, booby booby boo.”
Countless numbers of babies were rocked to sleep to the tune of that song. Yes, in our family it’s all about the booby. That’s how we roll. I mean, who else could go from birthdays to boobies all in the same blog post?



Happy Birthday Brookie! I love you and you were well worth the eight long hours of excruciating pain.