thirty three

I turned 33 over the weekend. Wow! I feel old. Ha! Time is such a funny thing. In that when you are in the moment it can sometimes seem very slow but when you look back over a period of time it is so fast. I sometimes wonder how on earth I graduated from high school 15 years ago. It seems like it was just yesterday. But a lot has happened to me in those 15 years for sure.

I used to have this weird obsession with hating the number three. I didn’t like a three to be in any number that pertained to me: hotel rooms, phone numbers, dates, etc. I developed this weird hatred for the number sometime around my 23rd birthday. See I always thought threes were bad luck for me. Anytime there had been a three in my age I connected it to something bad happening:

3 years old: I cut my face on a swing set so severely that I had to have surgery to sew it up, every picture of me from thereon out I have vitamin E cream slathered on, and I still have the scar today.

13 years old: I contracted bacterial meningitis and encephalitis (swelling of the brain) and was hospitalized for a while. I ended up having a seizure in a swimming pool at summer camp 90 minutes away from my house. My 10 year old  brother saved my life by dragging an unconcious  me to the side of the pool and alerting the lifeguards that his sister was drowning.

23 years old: This isn’t something I regularly talk about but I was married before Keith. I got married right out of college to a guy who was not very nice. He was verbally and physically abusive and it took me all of 9 months to get he hell out of dodge. I got divorced at 23.

30 years old: I had two miscarriages.

31 years old: I had fertility problems and couldn’t get pregnant.

So it would seem that threes weren’t exactly very nice to me. But. I realized that for every bad thing that happened there was a good thing too! It’s all in the way you look at things. I tend to be a half glass empty kind of girl but what if I wasn’t. What if I saw the good in the number three.

3 years old: My brother was born. In fact I got into the swing set accident the week my mom brought him home from the hospital.

13 years old: My brother saved my life.

23 years old: I had the courage to walk out on a marriage that was unhealthy and dangerous. I was a strong woman who stood up for herself and walked out to a better life.

30 years old: I decided to go back to school to become a teacher. I stopped working in a career I was unhappy in and sought out one that I actually wanted.

31 years old: We got Bella. After the second miscarriage I needed to be a mother and we adopted the best dog in the world. I feel like Bella really saved me from going through a major depression and helped me to put my feet forward. I also got pregnant with Trey…in what would be our third times a charm baby!

32 years old: I had Trey. I actually had Trey on October 27, 2013 and I had had my first  miscarriage on October 26, 2011. Talk about coming full circle.

33 years old: I have the most amazing 5 1/2 month old in the world with an amazing husband (of almost 8 years) by my side!

What’s ironic is that Trey was our third pregnancy. He was our third times a charm baby and in honor of that we actually named him Trey (which means three) and he was born in the year 2013. And my anniversary is actually on April 30th, a day I married the best man in the world for me. So all in all I’d say the number three has become my lucky number and one that I will always always love.

So 33? This is going to be the best year ever. 🙂