Happy Birthday Arron

You would have been 47 today. I saw a little bird outside my window this morning flitting around in the deep snow that is blanketing Seattle today and thought of you. I know you would have been dragging Carter and Olivia out of bed this morning to go and play in it with you, building snowmen, sled ramps, sliding down the steep streets hooting your head off. You would smack them both in the bum with snowballs and laugh when they nailed you back. Jill told me about the monarch butterfly that Caelin found out of nowhere and put on the Christmas tree. That was a nice touch. I love how you find these little ways of reminding us of you. I probably should be doing something more to mark the day, but you know as well as I do that you are not forgotten. You were always content to downplay the birthdays anyway (probably so you didn't have to buy presents!) A Carvel ice cream cake doesn't make you any more alive, even to the kids whose memory of you is mini mouse pancakes and farts. Instead I keep you alive for them in the little stories I tell of you. How I stepped on your foot two seconds after you told me not to when you were showing me that cool spider even though you had 10 stitches in your foot from stepping on glass at the bottom of the lake, or how you always took a picture of yourself with your favorite haircut to Supercuts so they would get it right. Both Carter and Olivia now follow suit. I thought of you yesterday as I was earning some serious mommy points with Olivia by taking her downtown through the deep snow (did you laugh at the chains on my Prius?) so the fancy salon could fix the bad haircut she had received the day before. You had one of those once and wore a hat for a month. Olivia cried and so I drove through the blizzard and they fixed her hair and I bought her a crepe and there you were. Crepes with lemon, driving like a maniac through the snow, laughing all the way. Happy Birthday Arron. You remind us of you every day in your little ways. Love, Lemonbird