By Kate
It was Ally’s 2 years old birthday 2 weeks ago.
In fact, both Dave and I actually took a day off way in advance on the actual day of her birthday, thinking then that we would probably bring her somewhere and celebrate her birthday together.
On the day or her birthday, we were at our new place, busy with the remodelling. Our place was more or less done, but there were still lots of touch-ups we had to oversee, and a lot more cleaning to do. Given that we mainly had just the weekends to oversee the project, having a weekday off kind of helps us to expedite the process a little.
A such, we were at our new place from the morning till evening. We didn’t do anything special with Ally. Nor did we get her a cake or something (we didn’t think it was important since we already had a celebration with extended family members before that and already bought her a cake then). Dave and I didn’t get any presents for her this time as we didn’t think that there was anything in particular that she needed and thought that just a special day together as a family would suffice. We did however, went out in the evening, since it was the mid-autumn festival. There was beautiful exhibitions of brightly lited lanterns in the evening, coupled with minor celebrations and performances by various groups. Ally enjoyed it thoroughly (or at least she seems so to me :)).
It was a warm evening, and both Dave and I were very tired from the cleaning up in the day. Plus it didn’t help that we had to carry Ally most of the time while viewing the beautiful exhibits later on.
The night ended.
That’s all we did.
But I thought we gave her one of the best presents and lessons – the unconditional love from your parents and spending quality time together. Yes it sounds easy but we should never ever take it for granted.
Life is after all, chained up by episodes of our experience and we probably remember what we went through more than what we owned.