Breithla' shona duit Padraig!

Go maire tu' an la'!!!!! Translation: Happy birthday Patrick! And many more!!!!! Just wanted to let my blog buddies share a very special day in this house. Patrick has, according to him, "Been scarred for life" when it comes to birthdays. In the past thirteen years we have had interventions for him and will continue in years to come in the hopes that those scars can fade away. You see he has NO HISTORY of having a birthday celebration for the first fifty years of his life!!!!!!!!!!!! Sadly this has left him completely baffled as to why we make such a big deal about remembering everyone's birthday every year with, at the very least, a simple cake. I just cannot wrap my brain around this lack of interest in birthdays! Then again I was raised in the United States by a mother who made a BIG deal out of each of her children's birthdays. Trying my best to walk that mile in another's shoes I try to understand how consuming farm life can be in the spring, and how impractical it would be to leave the planting to drive hours by horse and cart to the county seat to register the birth of yet another baby, and how little there was to exist on let alone a little extra sugar and flour to make a cake.....but I just don't get it emotionally. How did his mother not remember those days when her children entered the world...literally I mean REMEMBER. Incredulous as it seems Patrick and his siblings didn't even know their birth date until it was time to get their emigration visa's! Most of them have big discrepancies between the record of their birth at the local church and the official birth certificate! Custom is to believe the church because they were sure to go every week to church but it could be weeks before a trip was made into the civil registry. So every May 13th we will put a cake in front of him and sing Happy Birthday and he will smile sheepishly wondering just how to react to the attention. "To me, fair friend, you never can be old, for as you were when first your eye I eye'd, such seems your beauty still." William Shakespeare Your family adores you and cherishes the day you were born. It marked the day our family began! So just smile and be happy!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay, so the intervention just can't move to actual "gifts" quite yet. He really, really is so uncomfortable with this whole day that we are going slow and steady. The one scar I can actually report is the craving/addiction to the sweets he was denied in his youth! So dearest Daddy, enjoy the Irish treats...quickly before your girls declare them abandoned and thus fair game.

"Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be...."Robert Browning