Day 165 The Perfect Mom Project

(Special note – Today, the role of Ragen will be played by her husband, Mark. I told her that for her birthday, I would take care of writing her blog for her. My apologies to anyone having to suffer through this)

Happy Birthday Ragen!!! Today is a special birthday for Ragen. It is one of the milestone years (I hesitate to divulge the age, but it starts with 5 and ends with zero and rhymes with “Nifty” – Or as Ragen referred to it this morning, she is a half century old).

Just like most other holidays, birthday celebrations here have certain traditions that must be followed. Without these customs, the birthdays would feel like they were missing something. Two of the traditions that we have for our birthday celebrations here are letting the person celebrating pick whatever they want to have for dinner that day, and having the “You’re Special” bear on your plate during that special meal. These are inalienable rights in our house and cannot be tampered with (although I do recall having to talk one of my daughters out of picking hot dogs for that meal). Neither tradition is a major thing, but if we do not have these, it would not feel like a birthday.

It’s funny how these traditions come into being. I have no idea where the bear came from but I can’t remember a birthday celebration where we didn’t have it sitting on our plates.

When I was growing up, we had certain special traditions for your birthday. When you woke up, there was always a present at the end of your bed. I always loved that, because it started the day out with a bang!! It was a little like Christmas, but better because you knew you had more presents coming later. Once we were married, we tried doing that with our family, but for some reason that tradition just didn’t seem to fit, so we created our own traditions.

Will our girls carry on the traditions we created? Not all of them and maybe none of them. They will have their own spouses and families and will develop their own traditions. And that’s fine. Some traditions will get carried on and some won’t. Traditions should not be burdens that have to be carried on from generation to generation, but something that have special meaning and that you look forward to. Ragen and I want our daughters to grow up to become independent. After all, isn’t that the whole goal of this parenting thing, to get your kids ready to become their own selves and have their own traditions, both old and new?