Dear 36 year old self

Congratulations. We made it to 36 years old. Granted, our birthday was over a month ago, but it should come as no surprise that it's taken this long to write something because, after all, our brain has become a the land where thoughts get lost.

That picture to the right? That's us. Today. The day after we colored our hair, wore the right amount of make-up and wore the pretty orange dress. We should remember this day for a while because a lot of people told us we looked pretty today. It felt great to hear someone say that to us because most of what we've thought about ourself lately is how frumpy and dumpy we've felt we looked.

This other picture? That was the 'before' of our hair. Notice the wiry gray things popping out? Those are 'old lady' hairs and we don't like those. We much prefer the more pulled together look we created today. The old lady hairs remind us that we are, in fact, getting old.

Let's talk about getting old. Our glasses, which we thought made us  look cool in high school -- even though they were fake -- are now a necessity. Our husband loves us in glasses (which we can't really figure out but will gladly accept) which is good because we've reached the age where we need them... for everything. We can no longer go to the grocery store without needing the glasses to look for the name of the soup we hope to buy.

Speaking of stores, let's talk about how we created this look today. We used a  #75 hair gray covering hair dye, Neutrogena Berry Fit lip gloss and Physicians Formula Mineral Wear Kit Flawless Complexion Kit 1 kit. Congratulations. It's only taken us about 25 years to figure out what makeup works well on us.

Can we talk about our body? Nah. Let's not. We've got a love thing going on. Let's not ruin it with self-loathing brought on by our bum knee and turned out ankles.

Let's instead talk about observations. Have you noticed how much time we spend on Pinterest and how much we resisted even joining the site? Let's admit, the site has been inspirational. Heck, we even learned how to do pretty up-do's with our hair. Even better, we found the inspiration which prompted the motivation to fix up the home office. It does look nice, doesn't it?

What else has been going on?

We'd remember what else has been going on in our life except right around our birthday, our memory went to hell. Actually, our memory started failing us soon after our tonsillectomy last year and sped up with the memory lapses upon our 36th birthday.

We're struggling with getting older. There are certain things to love about it such as maturity and wisdom, but  we're not always quick to remember those tenets of middle age.

Middle. Age.

How did we get here? Don't you remember being 16 and loving to hate the world? Do you remember how every relationship seemed like it was the most important thing in the world? Do you remember how confusing it was to be a teen-ager? We had rules to live by and no sense of real direction about where our life was going to take us. We wanted to explore and see the world yet we had no idea how we'd get there. Thankfully, we're able to tell that 16 year old self that we do, in fact, get to travel. But that's fodder for another letter.

Well, dear 36 year old self. Getting older means needing more rest. Never mind that it's 9:30 on a Tuesday and that 10 years ago you'd just be setting out to go on a date (case in point: the man you married). Time to settle in with your fuzzy socks, hand cream and a good book and nod off to sleep.

Sweet dreams....