Today I slept through Jim’s alarm and didn’t wake up till 7:15 and was groggy. Strange to wake up alone and miss making breakfast and seeing him off to work. Strange to wake up alone In the house as no kids are here either. Strange to shuffle around In silence, asking Alexa the news while doing the dishes and cleaning litter boxes

Strange and sad to do these normal chores while thinking about how 16 years ago today I was in a hospital bed with an IV Pitocin drip, watching some random movie, waiting for the anesthesiologists to show up and give me an epidural.

It sucks to not get to spend the day with my son, which is our tradition. Normally on his birthday he would get to skip school and I would get to skip work and we would spend the morning and afternoon together. Doing whatever he wanted. But not this year.

This year he’s waking up at his dads house and I’m alone here. No doubt he’ll be skipping school anyway as he has been doing that for about a month now. And I’ll be lifting myself up to my office to work in about 30 minutes and sifting through about 30 hours of work to figure out which things are the most important.

What I would really like to do is get out and plant those annuals and water my newly planted veggies and continue to think about this day in history.

If I can’t be with my son, I’d like to be alone with my thoughts about the fact that when he was born, we didn’t have a name picked out. How we let people who came to visit make suggestions and kept a whiteboard where people could vote. It wasn’t until the last day in the hospital that we landed on the right name. And his sister, who was two years old at the time couldn’t talk very well yet could not pronounce it.

She said “Booker”. That actually stuck for a while and after a few weeks we actually thought about changing his name to Booker. But then magically one day she started saying it better, and so the idea of switching his name faded away. She would not be able to say it correctly for a while though, because of trouble with the “R” sound at the end. She’d call him “coopa”.

Sometimes we still call him Coopa. Or Coopa-Troopa. Come to think of it, both my kids had issues with the “r” sound and both saw a speech pathologist in elementary school for this. I’m inclined to think there’s some genetic reason for this. Or maybe their dad and I just did not do a good job enunciating our “Rrrrs” when we would talk.

Should have talked more like pirates when they were little. I Guess.

He’s 16 and has no interest in driving or getting his license. So different than his sister whose goal in life when she turned 16 was to go to the DMV and get her license. Crazy to think about all the ways they are so alike and all the ways they are different.

We did have a FaceTime call earlier and I was surprised he was awake. What a bummer to be stuck at home on your birthday and not get to do anything special to celebrate. When he does get to come back (hopefully sometime this weekend) we can do some special things. At the very least, I can cook him his favorite meals.

Chicken and rice stir fry, macaroni and cheese, veggie straws, grilled cheese sandwiches, chocolate covered donuts, roasted asparagus, vanilla chai, cream soda, buttered noodles, ramen, steaks on the grill, goldfish crackers. No fruit EVER. 😜

Writing this post is starting to make me hungry. Ha!

Time to get to work anyway. Guess my lamenting the strangeness of this day has come to an end.

Cheers to 16 years and many, many, many more! I love you C, Booker, Coopa, Coopa-troopa, Super Coop.. My Buddy, My Cooper.

XOXO
~Mom