This is the 17th year that Stuart and I have celebrated our birthday’s together (if you don’t count the ones when we were at Uni together, where a disproportionate number of our friends also had birthdays in the second half of September – looks like the Christmas/New Year period was a good time for conceiving future pharmacists!) but it’s the first time we’ll be doing so from opposite sides of the world.
Sascha and I are having a fabulous time in Paris combining a bit of work and a bit of fashion, but the lure of a potential Hawthorn 3-peat proved too strong for Stuart and Sam to resist, so after a lovely week together in Singapore they headed back to Australia. Ironically the only other time that we’ve not spent Stuart’s birthday with him also involved a Hawthorn Grand Final, which was played on his birthday in 2008. The kids were young enough then though that we could just tell them it was his birthday on the Sunday when he flew back home, there was cake, candles and a very happy Dad so they were none the wiser.
While we all decided together that this was the plan for this year, it feels very weird today to know that not only will we not see him on his birthday, but that we won’t even wake up until his birthday is nearly half over. I guess that’s really the purpose of this post, to let you know Stuart as soon as you wake up that we are thinking of you, we miss you, and that we’re hoping the WiFi on the Eurostar as we head to London for a day of meetings will be strong enough for us to FaceTime you!
I’ve put together this little collection from birthdays past as a reminder of some of the ones we’ve spent together (unfortunately even though we were all together last year there isn’t a picture of us all on your birthday, anyone would think you were concentrating on running a marathon or something…), and next year lets hope the AFL and Paris Fashion Week can coordinate their schedules a little better!
