30? Really? When Did That Happen??

Last night (or early this morning, more truthfully), I was tossing and turning in bed as I do every night (or every early morning), and it hit me- I'm THIRTY. It's not like I just turned 30 like Jennifer and Michelle. No, I've been here since last June. I think what surprised me most about realizing that I'm 30 is that I have absolutely no recollection of ever imaging what thirty would be like. (You know how you picture what life will be like when you turn 16, 18, 21.....) For me, 30 feels like 20, except for the odd aches and pains, the popping and cracking, the heartburn and insomnia. Is 30 supposed to feel like 20? Will 40 feel like 30? If 30 doesn't feel like what I think 30 should feel like, I can't even imagine the feeling of an age like 80 (God willing)!

There is one age related thing that I have imagined and that's climbing Mt Kilimanjaro for my 40th birthday. Well.......I had decided to push that back to my 45th, so Jonas would be older and also so that if he has younger siblings, they'd also be old enough to go on the trip. And then I watched a program on PBS about the mountain, and let me tell you, that IMAX program lied about the difficulty of Kilimanjaro. So as I'm watching it, I'm starting to lose my interest in climbing to the top, and then the narrator says the magic phrase: active volcano. Oh, hell no. I'd rather go lie on a beach in the Turks & Caicos for both my 40th and 45th, thank you very much. (The program also made me sad because the narrator said that the glacier at the top might be melted away by 2016, which will be very detrimental to the people living in the shadow of Kilimanjaro.)