Creating a Birthday

I never realized how much fun it would be to create a birth date for Sunny. Imagine spending 22 years without one birthday celebration? Yes, living in the Sahel is so very different from life in the US. I hear people celebrating birthday weeks or months and yet most (or many?) of my friends in the Sahel don’t know their birth date and have never had a birthday celebration. The most common birthday in the Sahel is 01/01/and the year. They have no idea of their birth date, but generally the year is known.

News Flash: We celebrate each of our children’s birthdays, baptism days and gotcha days, so it was a little awkward not have a birthday for Sunny. We talked to him about it. He asked his biological siblings about it. They didn’t know his birth date. So we decided we needed to come up with a birth date. Often names have significance about the time of birth. But in Sunny’s case his name signifies that he was a twin, not the time of year. We asked him over and over again to choose a day. But it was awkward for him to choose a day for us to do something special for him. So I was thinking about April 15th as his birth date. Then Smile On suggested the same date! A Delight agreed and although Zig Zag preferred today, he was willing to wait 3 days until the 15th. What a great celebration we had! Never thought I would have a chance to make up a birthday! 

Along those lines, we had to make some doctors appointments for Easy Teasy before we knew his birthday. So my Mom guessed. Wow were they confused when I called up to say I needed to change his birthday! What an interesting world we live in.

-- La Maestra