Celebrating a birthday season instead of a birthday date. Celebrating myself and my family

Dear diary,

For a few years now, I have been celebrating birthdays as a birthday season rather than celebrating one single day.

I was already on a spiritual journey and observing astrology when I started celebrating a birthday season. I celebrate/ observe my birthday (and my children’s) for about 2 weeks, 1 before and one after.

My birthday month is my month. I personally love March from beginning to end, and I have a great feeling during the entire month. I don’t go crazy with celebration, but I do things for myself during the entire month. Now that I have been studying astrology for about 4 years, I celebrate the Pisces season as my season.

I started doing this because I realized how difficult it is to do all the things I wanted to do for my children’s birthday, and I had a feeling that I was not doing enough for them. Then I started doing some things before and some things after the birthday.

With this exercise, I intend to be more intentional about my family birthday celebrations and solidify this by adding reminders to my calendar. I will also add birthday reminders to my partner’s calendar.

Some things I do for my children pre and post birthdays:

• Buy and stock their favorite foods
• Take them to their favorite store
• Let them choose what I’m cooking
• Give them gifts
• Let them choose activities to engage in
• Spend extra time with said kid. Usually, I’m doing my best to be very fair and spend about the same time with each kid unless we’re celebrating a child’s birthday season, then they get extra time and attention and I might spend an hour cuddling with or holding a young child or 30 minutes having a deep chat with a big child.
• Something I’ve started doing with my big girls is talk about how they’re changing. I let them know in which ways I think they’ve grown. I ask how they have changed. I tell them what I like about the “new” them, and oftentimes, they have not noticed how they have grown up.
• I am grateful for their birthday. It might seem silly or small and unnecessary, but many parents regret the growth of their children. This is silly because we can’t stop them from growing up, and it sends the children the message that they’re wrong for growing.

I am not talking about my birthday anymore. Last weekend we celebrated the birthday of my second daughter. We will continue her celebration through the week and next weekend. 

There are new ways in which I want to celebrate my children and therefore I’ll write about this again because whatever I write about, I get better at!

With love and light,

Eve