Tetris and Birthdays

Turning 47 was so uneventful. I've been 47 for a whole week now and nothing really feels different except for the lovely roses DH gave me that are still pretty after a week. He's been out of town almost constantly, but was home for my birthday and it was actually the only day for over a week that we would all be together because Bam left on his super fabulous 5th grade field trip to Catalina Island Marine Institute the night before DH got home last week and came home from Cali the night after DH left again on another business trip. He will be home again Friday and gone again on Sunday. It's wearing on us all. Him, clearly, most of all. But for me, it just means that all the scheduling tetris of parenting and adulting falls entirely to me. And that tetris makes me crazy. I look at my calendar and see all the blocks overlapping and covering each other, noting all the places I really need to be at the same time and I get so very claustrophobic. With that very claustrophobic feeling, we were supposed to go to dinner as a family, after piano, which ends at 6:30. And I just couldn't. The idea of a late dinner, leading to late bedtimes combined with the regular early rising of seminary and school and DH flying out again and I just couldn't. So, I begged to just get Papa Murphy's pizza. DH said I could do what I wanted, it was my birthday. The kids groaned a little but eventually saw reason. I made a cake that I love but none of them like, so they had ice cream and DH and I had slices of cake and we all went to bed. I am old, I suppose, because that truly seemed the best use of my birthday evening.

The best birthday gift of the whole month has been, in retrospect, seeing how my schedule has just worked every day, even and especially when it seemed too tight, too impossible to work. People step in to carpool, activities that crowded things get cancelled, and CE, being that she has had no actual car for herself, has become increasingly magnanimous, willingly picking people up and ferrying them places in her dad's car and just generally making tetris work.

DH bought me an Ikea desk for my birthday and we bought some new bookshelves for the living room (we are ever in need of bookshelves and never able to purge very many of our beloved books. They are everywhere). I like putting together (simple) Ikea furniture. It is an oddly satisfying 3D puzzle, I suppose. My favorite piece is the circular twisty thing that stabilizes and locks bolts into place when you twist it. I suppose that's how life has been this month. Schedule tetris, putting everything together and the crazy making claustrophobia of it all and then the Divine Builder comes in with His master twisty thing and just settles everything, locks it into a workable plan. What a blessing to feel that, as I am honestly trying to do what is needful, He, as always, makes up the difference in very real, very tangible ways.