Thirty. Freaking. Five.

Over the weekend, I turned thirty-five years old.

Thirtyfreakingfive.

I can no longer say I'm in my early thirties (not that I ever really did, but at least I had the option to). I'm firmly in the middle, and a mere five years away from being forty. Sigh.

I woke up the day before my birthday with a fever of 103.5, so I stayed in bed all day while the boys did their own thing and left the house a disaster, as boys tend to do. But I felt well enough by evening time to go to my brother and sister-in-law's house for an amazing birthday feast of home-cooked Thai food. Because nothing motivates me more than a good meal, y'all. I could have been on my deathbed and I still would have managed to stuff my face.

And my mom bought me an ice cream cake!

I don't normally get birthday presents (I'm 35, not 13) but for some reason this year I was totally spoiled. I got a new griddle that cooks like eight hundred pancakes at once, and some super-cushiony mats for my kitchen floor. Methinks my family is angling for a Labor Day breakfast at my place.

And then my husband gave me this artfully wrapped parcel. Whatever could it be?

Yes, that is seriously how Curtis "wraps." A Walmart sack and paper towels.

But it didn't matter how it looked, because inside there was ...

... incentive to walk off the Thai food and ice cream cake! Awwww yeeeeahhh.

On my actual birthday I still had a fever, but it was lower, so I popped a handful of ibuprofen and put my big-girl panties on because I had stuff to do, damn it. Curtis and I went to our friend Bobby's farm for some good old-fashioned manual labor. We hauled brush and cleared out a fenceline, and then put up the actual fence.

Believe it or not, I couldn't have enjoyed myself much more; I actually love hard work in the outdoors. (You can take the girl out of rural Missouri, but you can't take the rural Missouri out of the girl.) There's just something about sweat and sun and fresh air and effort and results - ironically enough, it's cleansing, a feeling I can't get anywhere else. I tried to take a selfie to show how dirty my clothes were, but I pretty much just managed to highlight how much my excessive crotch sweat made me look like I had pissed myself.

All in all, I had the best birthday I've had in years - despite being kind of sick, and waking up with a zit the size of Mt. Everest on my cheek. Because my body was like, "You may be inching closer to forty, but your face is gonna look fourteen! ... Oh, except for those wrinkles. Welcome to thirty-five."