It's my birthday and I'll laugh if I want to!

I'm not really a birthday kind of gal. I prefer Christmas and Halloween, holidays where food and family are important and people give you things and you can dress up if you want to. (I work at home in casual attire, so putting on grown-up clothes is actually dressing up for me.) and people give you candy! I never did like Mary Janes though--and as far as I can tell, you only got Mary Janes at Halloween.
So, Christmas and Halloween are my holidays. And Thanksgiving too.
This year, I have hit one of the "big 0" birthdays and it's come at a time when I'm going through family pictures and scanning the ones I want to keep and letting go of the rest. I ran across this picture of myself and it gave me pause. I'm probably around two in the picture with a haircut that has my mother's hand all over it. (To this day I don't wear bangs because she traumatized me!)
But what strikes me is that in the picture,  I have a skinned knee and I'm laughing.
I was a happy kid. And I got a lot of skinned knees.  And I laughed them off.
And that's a lesson I want to take with me into the next decades of my life.
Life is full of skinned knees and birthdays and sometimes, you just have to laugh it off.
And I cannot WAIT to see what happens next.