For the past sixteen years, my husband has basically ignored my birthday. As I marked the passage of each year he has played volleyball, gone out with his brothers for chicken wings, and worked late into the night. There have been no gifts. I take full responsibility for this.
In the year after our twin daughters were born, we went from a carefree young couple with an abundance of both time and money to a pair of sleep-deprived zombies attempting to meet the incessant demands of two fragile newborns on little uninterrupted rest and on half our previous income, as I took an extended leave of absence from work to care for my daughters' medical needs. I'm sure my husband meant well - after all, the helpful salesclerk assured him that this would be the perfect gift for a frazzled new mom - a delicate heart-shaped locket engraved with "Mother" next to a tiny rose etched in the 14 karat gold. It is truly lovely and all would have been well had my husband not mistakenly left the sales receipt in the box.
Perhaps it was my exhaustion talking, or the fact that I had spent most of the previous months in sweatpants and bedroom slippers, but when I saw the staggering amount which I knew would appear on the next credit card bill, I condemned myself to years of gift-less birthdays by blurting out what my mind screamed - "What on earth were you thinking?? For all this money I could have had something useful, like a new vaccuum cleaner!"
One reason I cherish that locket is because that was my last gift. Ever. Until this year...
I hardly had tiime to think about my birthday, with my girls (now busy teenagers) juggling a full weekend that included SATs, a Quiz tournament, a swim party and the high school prom. Of course my other twins, Em and Ellie, had their own needs - we had run out of the green hay they prefer and they were protesting the switch back to apparently-inedible yellow hay; Elliot was having digestive issues and Emerson had a nasty horn scur which had curved downward and was now growing into his head, a concern for which I would likely need to call the vet whenever I found a free moment. I was frantically attempting a last-minute alteration to Megan's prom dress when I heard Mike's voice through the back door as he told Emily, "Tell your mother I have her birthday gift out here." Really?? Now??
And there he was, holding in his hand a small indistinguishable grayish lump of something - and was that blood? Suddenly I knew exactly what he held - the most perfect birthday gift ever!
"Emerson's scur," he announced proudly. "I snuck up behind him and ripped it off."
A trick I have seen my vet perform but never been able to duplicate, manually detaching a goat's horn scur requires both strength and cunning as you must somehow restrain the writhing animal while twisting the bothersome horn bud (a common side effect of the disbudding done at birth - sorry, you'll have to read last year's blogs if you want the anatomy lesson) then snapping it off. It is a momentarily-painful but very necessary procedure and I can now relax for several months until it grows back and curves into his scalp yet again.
Sunshine for the prom photos, time with my family, and a goat horn on my kitchen counter. Best birthday ever.
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