Welp, folks, it's my birthday month, and d-day is ten days away.

Can you guess how old I'm turning?

I'll help you out.

I filtered this photo (like I do most).

My boy crush as a young girl was JTT.

My first concert was Rolling Stones, where my dad bought me one of those tongue t-shirts in the smallest size they had, and it went to my ankles.

The first concert I asked to go to and attended with front row tickets was N'SYNC with Britney Spears as an opener. Timberlake touched my hand (swoon).

I used to freeze Capri-Sun's and eat 'em with a spoon.

I watched wrestling when The Undertaker and Diamond Dallas Page were stars.

I had a field trip to 'Enterprise Village' as a kid.

I was alive when cord phones were a thing, the internet was still dial-up, and chatrooms were all the rage.

Facebook was started when I was in college.

Have you figured it out?

I'm on the heels of the ripe old age of 35, and I love getting older.

The funny thing is, I still feel like a kid. A kid -- with three kids -- who married another kid as a kid, and now both of us are raising those other kids.

You'd think as a thirty-five-year-old, I would no longer use run-on sentences, but you'd be wrong.

I do what I want with little fear of judgment these days, and that, my friend, is a perk of being in your mid-thirties and beyond.

You, sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, figure out that this one life is yours and that spending a single gosh darn second more worrying if you're doing things perfectly 'right' or if everyone (or anyone) around you agrees with you and all your choices, is a waste.

You reach this age where you've got so much life ahead of you, but also a lot of life behind you, and it's really freakin' exciting to look towards an adventure-filled future with lots of helpful prior experience under your belt.

I've been married 13 years come July, and I've got a 9, 7, and 5-year-old.

I've got a hobby that fulfills me and a selfless husband who has worked his arse off in the not so 9-5 world for many years so that I wouldn't have to.

Life isn't always peaches and cream, and if I'm honest, sometimes it's more like sour lemons and bland crackers. BUT, what 34+ years of life experience gives you is perspective and peace -- that nobody's life is 'perfect,' but that the one you're living, oftentimes, it's more so than you think.

Because the 'perfect life,' at least for me, all that is, is me, growing alongside someone whose generally fun to grow alongside, as we both marvel at the daily growth of the tiny love nuggets we created those many years ago.

I don't know what year 35 will bring, hopefully not a lingering pandemic, but with hope, continued trust, and belief in myself that, on the regular, I'm getting a lot more right with this one life of mine than I think.