How I finally celebrated my birthday on my own after 11 years

You may be wondering how I can be happy to have celebrated my birthday on my own. But in the next few lines, I’ll try to explain why. I was expecting our first child 11 years ago. The due date was set for August 21. But as is the case with first-born children, ours also decided to take some time and come into the world a few days later than planned. And our son chose August 25 as his date of birth – my birthday. A beautiful quirk of fate, over which everyone wonders about, and I am always very happy about it when I say it and I’m proud that “we” did it this way. But since then, I have never celebrated my birthday on my own.

With our move to Switzerland, the celebration of my birthday became all the more sidelined because it was time to organize our son’s party. As single and childless, I once vowed that I would never do such things in our country because WE (my husband and I) were used to celebrating birthdays in the family circle and I will not involve such “modern conveniences” in the upbringing of our future children! Hm… never say never…

Given that children’s birthday parties are common in Switzerland, I did not avoid holding them either – we want to integrate and we do not want to pull our children out of the team just by once-promising something in my mind. And so every year on August 25th, instead of enjoying the sweet feeling that is my birthday and I don’t have to do anything (I hope you feel the irony), I was busy since the morning to be able to prepare everything necessary before a bunch of + – eight children show up and want to be amused for about 3 hours. Bake a cake, prepare decorations, plan activities, hide anything that could break… and then clean everything up again, collect piles of wrapping paper, vacuum a million crumbs from the cake, wipe up spilled drinks… in the evening I was just ready to throw my feet on the table and pour a bottle glass of wine.

Please don’t get me wrong – I liked doing it all for our Dominik. In addition, I think that organizing is in my blood and I really have no problem preparing such a party. But it just sometimes bothered me in my head (however selfish and self-centered it may sound): “What about me? Don’t I deserve a celebration? ”

Last year, the better times started to shine when our birthdays came out on Sunday (so the party didn’t take place until Monday) and I found out that those who have birthdays have a free boat trip on Lake Thun, moreover in first class. So we spent a beautiful afternoon on a boat and then in Spiez.

This year, our Dominik has quite reasonably decided that the parties are for small children, and anyway, it wouldnt be possible to plan it when the school schedule is pretty busy and then all his friends have some training… in short: that this year I will have a unique opportunity to break out of our birthday too a bit for myself. All the more so because our little one is already in kindergarten. So I took advantage of this luxury of having time for myself and I can celebrate my birthday on my own! Yay!

So I went to Bern in the morning. I have loved this city since we first entered here and I could soak up its amazing atmosphere. I enjoyed my coffee on the Münsterplatform and explored hitherto unknown corners. I then returned home full of incredible energy and the feeling that I had a wonderful time after 11 years 🙂 And then Dominik and I were able to celebrate together during a family dinner (which fortunately I didn’t have to cook 😉).