3 Sept 2020

It’s my husband’s birthday today. He is now 57 and officially a year older than me. This is a momentous occasion in my life, because it is the time of the year when I can can officially give him a hard time about being so old. By next month this conversation will cease, but for now I’m a sugar baby.

Because it’s his birthday, and because he’s so old, he got to make all the choices about what we did today. I’m not making any comments about how this is no different to any other day, because it’s his birthday and I’m being nice. Only another eight hours or so to go before his birthday finishes and I can go back to being my disagreeable self and recommence picking on him.

So today has been his amazing hippobirdday. We started by watching pelicans get fed. Very nice. Then we went to a bird place we last went to nearly twenty years ago with the kids. It was great, and the added bonus was the maze they had out the back. We joked going in about racing to the centre, Simon taking the left handed approach and me the right handed approach. We were both a little amazed about how big it was. I won, by the way, but because it’s his birthday I’ll call it a draw. But you know and I know, so we’re all good 🙂 He was first out of the maze, but only because I’d taken my time to do some time lapse videoing. And got lost a couple of times. But I did that to make him feel superior on his birthday. And because you have to pander to old people sometimes.

We then went in a whale watching cruise. (In my story the whales are taking the role of the hippos of the deep, by the way.) After an hour of looking at a lot of water but no whales, we had kind of accepted that we were on a nice ocean trip instead, and then suddenly there were whales everywhere!

Not only were there heaps of whales, but there were heaps of whales who were interested in the boat. They waved, they poked their noses up out of the water, they rolled over in case we wanted to scratch their bellies, and so on – sooooo close to the boat.

The camera got a workout, the red wine we had skilfully hidden inside a coffee mug got ignored, and even the crew were raving about our excellent day on the water.

And as we left to head back to the coast they poked their tails up and waved goodbye as well.

It truly was an amazing day.

What a nice wife I am, to organise such a brilliant day for my husband’s birthday.