it’s my birthday. to celebrate, henry contracted hand, foot, and mouth disease. (for those of you who aren’t up on your childhood diseases, it means his hands, feet, and mouth are covered with blisters and he cries all night and he cries all day and not even ice cream can calm his tears.) we’ve been watching movies since wednesday. there’s nothing like days on end of baby einstein and veggie tales and clifford the big red dog to make a woman balancing on the cusp of thirty-hood examine her life.

to keep my mind off how badly i want to curl up in my own bed and cry until i fall asleep, i will now make a list of everything (okay, not everything) that i’m glad i did in my twenties. (i realize i still have a year left in my twenties, so if anything else of note happens, you’ll be the first to know.)

1. i became twitterpated with a bearded man who wrote poetry.
2. i traipsed all over london: plunking down seven pounds every other night to see theatre (chekhov! shakespeare! patrick stewart!)
3. i backpacked through france, germany, and switzerland with my sister and a few other scraggly girls, spending at least one memorable night in a camper outside of munich with a bunch of very rowdy, very drunk, very irish people.
4. i became twitterpated with a non-bearded man who wrote poetry.
5. i ate lots and lots of key lime pie ice cream from the corner maverick gas station in provo, utah.
6. i became twitterpated with a non-bearded, non-poetry-writing man who made art.
7. i lived in russia: taught the hokey-pokey to rooms full of russians to critical acclaim.
8. i hiked most of the way from scotland to london. (yes, there was a lot of rain.)
9. i became twitterpated by a non-bearded man with a gimp leg who occasionally wrote me poetry but mostly talked to me about math and astronomy.
10. then i married him.
11. i graduated from college.
12. i got my masters degree.
13. i had a baby. in a bathtub. (or was it a whirlpool?)
14. i wrote a book about russia.
15. i had my first publication. (if you don’t count that pretty little ditty i wrote for dog fancy when i was twelve.)
16. i moved to cleveland.

what about you? remembering something i left off the list? remembering something you’ve done yourself… ?