Friday Felicities #12

What's making me happy today is that today is my birthday! Today's Friday Felicities post goes out to my parents.

I credit my Mom and Dad for the fact that I am one of those people who loooooves their birthday. In a family with five children, the opportunities for each of us to be celebrated individually were limited, but our birthday was certainly one of those times. 

In my family, your birthday day was all about you, beginning with breakfast, when the Birthday Celebrant's place was set with Mom's "good" china and Waterford crystal.

There was also a Kellogg's Fun Pak awaiting the Birthday Girl/Boy's first choice of "cold" cereal - a big treat since we ate hot cereal every week day. I wasn't (and still am not) a fan of the super-sugary cereals, so my foks always got me the non-sugary version of the Fun Pak that included Rice Krispies and Special K.

Since finding out about this tradition, my lovely friend Anne has provided me with a Snak Pak on each of my birthdays since we've met, which is going on 17 years.

We were invited to not only produce a Birthday List of the gifts we wanted, but we got to choose the menu for our birthday meal. We never got all those presents, obviously, but we did always get our special meal. Depending on the request, the whole family got to enjoy the meal choice (pork chops and scalloped potatoes, my menu for at least 5 years running), or the Birthday Celebrant got their own special meal (my brothers often chose steak). I always had pumpkin pie as my dessert.

Over dinner, my Mom would recount the story of the day we were born ("X years ago today...."), and the highlights for each person were always the same (mine involved a 95-year-old lady cab driver; my brother's, Mom's erroneous assumption that labour pains were indigestion from the hot dog she ate that day).

So there you have it - the story of why I love my birthday and why I am happy (ha! pun intended) today.

Have a great weekend, (even if yours isn't going to include birthday cake like mine is).