Happy Birthday Natasha!

Natasha, on her birthday last year.

Happy Birthday! to a wonderful sister of mine.  I can not believe that exactly one year ago to this day we we're traversing the streets of Gastown, sipping Natasha's first legal beer, laughing, giggling and taking pictures without any notion of how the year would unfold.  Oh how a year can change things.  In the year since that day, you've completely changed the focus of you schooling, changed schools, and moved 11 hours away from the house you lived in last spring. You've worked bad jobs, and great jobs, the whole time keeping yourself out of any debt.  How many students can say that?!  It's proves your hard work ethic is stronger than most and for that you should be proud, you can do anything when you put your mind to it.

My brilliant (I mean it!), determined, courageous (just how do you live so far away from us?), hardworking (five classes plus a part time job?!) sister turns the big 2-0 today; the age in life where anything in still possible and you are just getting old enough to take advantage of it.

You are the kindest person I know, helping us out in wonderful ways, planting tomatoes in the summer and keeping them alive so that I could still enjoy homegrown tomatoes, even though I missed the season.  Sharing snowboard passes without question, looking after our house whenever we ask, or even things like running to the store when I've forgotten my 49th thing at Christmas time.  You never complain!  Thank you!

Be sure to follow your dreams Natasha, because at the end of life we'll want for only one thing: happiness.  A life of no regrets means fun was realized, we are after all, only here for ourselves!  So my beautiful inspirational sister, I raise a mug of coffee to you! and another wild and eventful year!  Happy Birthday!

 I sent Natasha's gift in the mail overnight.  The package had these wonderful things in it: wax and a seal, ink and what I know as a quill except metal and the most beautiful paper.  Along with that I sent four lemon-berry cupcakes in jars, because every person deserves homemade cake on their birthday.  Pretty awesome if you ask me!