37 Things for My 37th Birthday

Today is my birthday (happy 37th to me!) and I thought it might be fun to share 37 things about me today in celebration.

37 Things for My 37th Birthday

1. I’m just slightly under 5’4. I’ve spent my whole life being pretty tiny and when I’m occasionally around someone shorter than me (who isn’t a child), it feels SO WEIRD because it’s so infrequent.
2. I eat the same thing for breakfast virtually every morning. About six years ago, I started eating this breakfast scramble and I’m still not sick of it (in fact, some days I consider making it for lunch too!).
3. I don’t do open-back shoes. I see so many cute pairs of open-back shoes, but I just can’t wear them. It’s just so hard for me to keep them on and they make my feet tired and it’s worth the extra few seconds to buckle and unbuckle them.
4. I will never choose an Italian restaurant when we go out to eat. It doesn’t feel hard to me to make pasta at home and I rather choose something that’s harder to recreate at home, like sushi or a gourmet burger or Thai food.
5. I gravitate more toward work than play. It takes a lot of effort on my part to do fun things instead of just staying at home and being productive.
6. I’ll always take the pickles off a sandwich or burger. I don’t HATE pickles and I’ll occasionally eat a pickle spear, but I’d always prefer them not on my sandwich. They overpower everything!
7. I never dog-ear a page in a book. I don’t judge people who do, but I never got in the habit of doing it and I virtually never do it. But it delights me to see my mom’s dog-ears on my childhood books.
8. I have an inch-long scar on my shoulder. A few days after I came home from my freshman year of college, I got up early to take my mom to the airport (after staying up way too late the night before, naturally) and got light-headed and passed out. When I fell, I hit the edge of the tile hearth on our fireplace and gave myself a really deep cut. It hardly bled at all but required a bunch of stitches to close it up and it scarred pretty badly.
9. One of my bucket list items is to visit all the US Presidential libraries. I’m off to a slow start since I’ve only been to the JFK library in Boston and the LBJ library in Austin.
10. I didn’t graduate from high school. I was homeschooled from kindergarten until I went to public school in ninth grade, and then I only went to high school part time, so I didn’t have enough credits to graduate. I applied to college with my ACT score and the grades I did have.
11. I prefer to eat with small utensils. When I was in high school, we had a tiny metal spoon with Peter Rabbit on it and that was far and away my favorite spoon to eat with. When I go out for ice cream, I always eat with the tiny sample spoon and I always eat breakfast with a dessert fork instead of a regular fork.
12. I can ride a unicycle. My dad rode a unicycle in high school and when I was maybe 10 or 11, my mom bought him one for Christmas. She thought it’d be more fun if he could ride with us, so she bought a small one too and he taught me how to ride. I took a spin on it this spring and was delighted to discover that I can still do it!
13. Nothing makes me happier than finishing up food in the fridge. There’s something just SO satisfying about using up something that would have gone to waste otherwise.
14. I firmly believe shoes make or break an outfit. I’m committed to finding the right shoes for my closet that both look right and are comfortable.
15. My favorite city in the world is London. I’ll never get over the magic of this city – living there with our two oldest girls when they were little was one of the best experiences of my life.
16. I do NOT do scary movies. My interest level in purposefully scaring myself is zero.
17. If I had to choose a favorite dessert, it would probably be cookies. There’s just something unbeatable about a perfect cookie. Ice cream is a close second.
18. I cannot think straight in a messy house. It’s a big priority for me to keep our house neat and we spend a little time every morning and evening getting things tidied up. It doesn’t have to be perfect but I can’t live in a house with dishes piled in the sink, dirty clothes on the floor, or toys strewn all around.
19. My main extracurricular in high school was theater. I was in pretty much every production and absolutely loved it – my closest friends were almost all from theater and most of my strongest memories from high school are from theater.
20. I don’t have a favorite book genre. For me, the fun of reading is bouncing around – sometimes I’m in the mood for a love story, sometimes I want non-fiction, sometimes I want historical fiction, and sometimes I want something else. Picking one genre feels like choosing one food to eat for the rest of my life.
21. I learned from Bart the beauty of immediately unpacking after a trip. And I’m now convinced it’s a better way to live – there’s something so satisfying about unpacking within 30 minutes of getting home!
22. I started college as a public relations major. I did three semesters including applying to and getting accepted into the major and then switched to history instead.
23. There are only two things I care about when it comes to cars. I want something reliable and I want it to be clean. It bothers me zero percent to be a minivan mom and I love driving the 2003 Mazda Tribute we bought almost 11 years ago. As long as it’s vacuumed and not full of junk, all I want is to get from Point A to Point B.
24. My all-time favorite television show is White Collar. I legit think it’s the most perfect show ever made – there is no duo better than Neal and Peter.
25. I never used to paint my nails and now they’re almost always painted. Olive & June was a game changer for me – it’s so nice to paint my nails and have them look good for nearly a week and not worry about smudging them within the first five seconds (dry drops forever)!.
26. My very favorite beverage is water. For a long time, I always picked water because it was free, but now it really is my favorite thing to drink.
27. I played violin for 5 years growing up. Looking back, I was pretty good, but I have very little regret about not playing now.
28. I never wear perfume. For some reason, it makes me feel claustrophobic – I don’t like smelling it on myself and regret it every time I put it on.
29. I do not care about television and movies very much. I watch a fair number of shows with Bart because he LOVES movies and shows, but on my own, I almost never turn them on. I’ve been meaning to finish This Is Us for . . . . a solid year and have never gotten around to it.
30. Gift giving is NOT my love language. I actually find gift giving fairly stressful, but DANG do I feel like a superhero when I plan ahead enough to actually gift something thoughtful.
31. I never thought of myself as at all athletic growing up. So it’s totally changed my perception of myself to now be a skier, wake surfer, weight lifter, and pickle ball player. I never knew I’d love those kinds of things so much and they’ve brought so much joy to my adult life over the past few years.
32. I thought I’d hate having Bart work from home, but it’s actually the best thing ever. Bart started working at home quite a bit in 2015 when he took his first post-MBA job and now he’s worked at home full-time for the past 2.5 years. It’s changed my life to have another adult around to do school carpool, run errands, and basically keep life running more smoothly. I’d never choose to go back.
33. Stockings are my favorite part of Christmas, gift-wise. It’s just such a delight to pick out little gifts for stockings and the pressure is so low!
34. I am ALWAYS reading multiple books at once. I cannot imagine reading just a single book at a time – I love having several books going at all times.
35. I am not a pet person AT ALL. My girls would all love to have a dog or cat, but Bart and I are both totally uninterested. If they want to get animals when they’re adults and can be fully responsible for their care, they are more than welcome to do so.
36. Hair bows are one of those things I have an unending appetite for buying. I seriously DO NOT need any more bows (I literally have hundreds and two of my girls don’t even wear bows anymore) and yet, every month when Little Poppy Co releases their new bows, I’m like “YES. I need those.”
37. Having someone play with my hair is basically my favorite thing on the planet. My girls know that if one of them will brush or braid my hair, I’ll read another chapter pretty much every single time.

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