It’s been a week since I turned 30 years old, you want to know how it feels? I’m a mix of everything—happy, excited, grateful, in awe like I still can’t believe I’m now past my 20s, a little anxious about the future, driven to work harder and be better, blessed beyond words can say.
Turning 30, you find yourself pondering upon questions like, Am I living the life I’ve always wanted? Where have all the years gone? Have I invested in the right things? Am I happy? What’s next? True, you ask yourself these questions any given birthday anyway, but turning 30 kind of magnifies everything to a point where you end up feeling depressed (about what you didn’t have), or feeling like you’re on top of the clouds (for everything you have). Guess how I end up feeling? :)
My birthday celebration has never been more quiet and more low profile than this. And it has never been more childlike and more adult at the same time too. Lately I’ve been having some form of identity crisis: Pressured to act like, think like, and actually be an adult, whilst spending a lot of time singing Barney songs, being surrounded with dolls and toys, and acting silly to entertain our 7-month old twins.
That’s the story of my 30th birthday celebration. The theme was slumber party, where I spent the majority of the day in my PJs, keeping my heart from bursting into tiny pieces while playing and rolling in bed with my cute little dolls:
Tell me you didn’t just rotate your computer screen sideways. :P
Mommy are you taking our pictures again?
#bestillmyheart
There’s more of these photographs where it came from, but.. you get the picture, right? That’s my 30th birthday party in a nutshell, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Later in the evening my family came to have dinner with us, and we hung out in our tiny living room, around our darling twins like it’s their birthday. (I don’t mind at all.)
The truth is, I don’t think I accomplished a lot in my first 30 years. I don’t have a lot of things—not a big house, or a car, or a fat savings account. I may have seen a few cities outside this country, but I haven’t really gone places. I could spend hours processing my life, thinking about the things I wasn’t able to do before I turned 30, places I still haven’t seen, dreams that have yet to come true.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what didn’t happen. What matters is how God turned all my plans around and gave me these instead:
And how can I not feel so blessed and happy and rich when I have them? A husband I’m still so smitten about, two little girls who drive us crazy and fill this home with so much joy, a roof above our heads, food on our table, a warm bed to sleep at night.
You realize, even more when you turn 30, that the measure of happiness and fulfillment is not based on the material and financial things you acquired in your life, sometimes not even in the number of friends you have, but in the handful of people you journey this life with.
Now that, is a milestone worth celebrating.
God be praised and glorified in this life, always.
I'm Riz. I'm 
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