35 Things I Didn’t Expect at 35

I turn 35 today. Actually, officially, I already did because I was born at some obscene 4 o’clock in the morning hour. I like birthdays because it’s a good time to celebrate life, real life, and think back on where I’ve been and where I’m going.

So that’s what I’ve been doing.

I’ve said never too many times and tried to plan what God really controlled, but, thankfully, life is a journey and God doesn’t leave us the same. While thinking through what I can remember about the past 35 years, I came up with a list of surprises that make my life mine.

I didn’t expect to …

1. Be a stay-at-home mom … 
2. … who works on the side.
3. Walk through infertility.
4. Become a mom through two adoption processes.
5. Give up my career for the calling of motherhood.
6. Be a conservative mom.
7. Be a diabetic.
8. Wear an insulin pump.
9. Have online friends.
10. Meet online friends in real life.
11. Work toward self-publishing an ebook. {See #2.}
12. Own a lake house. {Want to rent it?}
13. Manage someone else’s vacation lake house. {Want to rent that one?}
14. Have a massage therapist in my life monthly.
15. Go to physical therapy for three months to address shoulder pain that led to virtually no range of motion.
16. Enjoy cooking my family dinner.
17. Be uninterested in baking.
18. Ever skip a daily shower.
19. Happily live in small-town Murray, Ky.
20. Like marriage more each year that passes. We’re almost a dozen years in.
21. Process childhood scars all over again.
22. Have certain friends and not have other friends in my everyday life.
23. Enjoy my siblings more now that we’re all grown-ups.
24. Like the lake. {But, really, I love it.}
25. Ever run a 5K. {And then there were three 5Ks in one year for a girl who isn’t really a runner. The first was in the snow.}
26. Say I’ve bungy jumped.
27. Not be in a newsroom anymore. I worked in various newsrooms for about six years after college and have been home for 6 1/2 years. {My farewell column is here.}
28. Enroll my kids in a private, classical school and love it.
29. Like Chinese food.
30. Be married to a self-employed attorney who is also a church elder and city councilman.
31. Highlight my hair.
32. See so many gray hairs.
33. Never mow the grass.
34. Never cook a turkey. 
35. Be excited about buying an eighth of a grass-fed Angus cow. {So convenient and so delicious.}

And, you know, for being filled of so many things I never expected, I can’t imagine myself anywhere else with anyone else. Life is worth celebrating, whether or not today is your birthday and even if it looks nothing like you expected. 

How have you been surprised in life?