Once upon a time....

Having a birthday feels like receiving an award. The spotlight is on you and everyone around is sending cheerful wishes while you accept a cake like award. So on this momentous occasion, I would like to make a thank you post, because life is short, and I might as well get this out of the way and off my social media bucket list... Thank you to my parents for birthing me and raising me with a ton of love and food security (did I mention I was a really "healthy" child?!) and teaching me to take the higher road, especially with my little bugger, oops I mean little brother. ;P Thank you to my brother for being my friend, confidant, entertainer, travel hack finder and forever being my sanity and patience tester. Thank you to my extended family for loving me, feeding me (very important!), teasing me (thanks for the tough love, guys!) and teaching me how to operate within a crazy and an overly protective family. Thank you to all my friends for being there when I needed you most, and also for being fun, thoughtful and pampering (speaking of which, still waiting on my birthday gifts....) Thank you to the family that I married into, which is also full of love and craziness, for raising my husband (he is awesome especially after the few tweaks I made) and for taking me to exotic places and indulging me in luxuries that I would have never gifted myself. <3 Thank you to my husband for being such a sweet and romantic person, especially after he eats his favorite foods served to him at tableside and has had enough time playing his iPad games. Thank you to my free spirited child for teaching me how to enjoy life by ignoring the mess and having fun jumping over the toys strewn around the living room...until I land on a tiny lego and start questioning the correctness of his philosophies... Thank you to all my teachers and gurus for spending time teaching me about the ways of the physical and spiritual world, and thank you to the random acquaintances whose wise words and stories have been etched in my memory forever so they can be extracted and used in times of need. A BIG thank you to nature for granting me beauty, grace, healthy body and mind and sarcasm, but most of all for running the universe efficiently and not ending the world. And last but not the least, thank you for reading this long post and for thinking of me! Love always, hu (gujarati for "moi")