I am not really 48 years old today....

It cannot be true. I remember like it was yesterday, figuring out with my friend Diane, how old we would be when it turned the year 2000. 35 years old! We laughed our heads off, impossible! We would NEVER be THAT old.

They say life goes by too fast. That with young children, the days are long but the years are short. Turns out that "They" are right.

So since I am old, getting over that hill, I feel entitled to write down some random memories...

When I was 11 years old, it was our country's bicentennial...200th birthday. 1976. Our family had a camp up on Lake Ontario, my father worked during the week and visited on weekends and on his vacations. So he picked out and brought up my birthday presents. A straw hat with a red-white-and-blue band, and a bag of red and white candies. My brother Joey made the cake. He put it on a board covered with foil, and iced it with frosting made with green jello. It was all he could find, apparently. I loved it. They thought of me, they remembered my birthday.

Casey and I used to climb this big tree and watch for our daddy's car to turn that corner and drive down the camp road. We didn't have a phone in the camp. When we saw him coming we would scramble down the tree, catch up with that Pinto station wagon, and jog along side it, all excited to see Daddy and see what he had brought from the city.

Now, before you think we were perhaps a bit well-off because we had a camp, think again. It was a mobile home, a trailer, on a very nice lot, right down the dirt road from a wonderful sandy beach. Not quite riches, but hey, we loved it. We had a big grassy yard with a fireplace out back, a basketball hoop set up, a sand pit to play in or jump over....and my parents kept it very nice, all freshly painted each year. They had saved up all those years of having children, and were able to pay for most of it out of savings.

Anyway, we loved when my Dad got there. Then he got out of the car. I grew up thinking it was normal for Daddies to be snappy and grumpy. He was responsible and took good care of us. He never hit us. But when he was stressed, he yelled. He crabbed and was miserable, and we never dared talk back. We figured out that he always was sorry when he yelled too much, because he would randomly give us a dollar or something. Of course he never actually said he was sorry. He wasn't always grumpy. We would sit around our camp fires at night, and he would tell us stories about the Frogman, or teach us all about the universe and all the galaxies and what infinity meant.

We had no television at camp. Only a radio and a stereo...when I hear the Carpenter's or Paul Simon, I remember those days...those days we didn't even know what day it was, unless it was Friday, and we knew Daddy was coming up. My older siblings who worked also came up on weekends, sometimes bringing friends with them. We had days of catching tadpoles...once we filled a huge bucket and lugged it all the way up the road to camp, and my mother told us to bring them right back down to that creek and leave them there where they were supposed to be. Immediately if not sooner, she would say.

Once we had a fish named Charlie. We caught him in the creek. He jumped out of the Cool-Whip bowl while we were off swimming. So we buried him under the trailer and painted a nice stone with his name on it. We made ourselves cry about Charlie.

We also had a wild bunny. It was injured, so we caught it easily and put it in a cardboard box with lots of soft grass and a little pillowcase to sleep on. My mother was SUPPOSED to be watching it while we played, but she watched it jump right out of that box and hop away. She said it would be happier in the woods. We were pretty mad at her.

Sometimes my mother gave us ten or fifteen cents to buy her a newspaper down the beach at the state park. I remember looking for flat stones as we walked there, flat stones that would sound like coins when we put them in the paper box and used the real money for candy.

When you're a kid, you think you will always be a kid.

Then you grow up and realize what a small portion of your life you spent in that blissful state of being taken care of and having such grand ideas.

Now I am getting older, and I am trying not to forget what it is like to be a kid. Now 9 of my kids are old enough to drive. Only three left in elementary school. They grow up too fast. Life goes by too fast.

This afternoon, we are going to Emily's house to have a little birthday celebration. I seriously hope no one wastes their money buying me anything...because I have all I ever wanted and more when all the kids are there at the same time. Seriously.