Happy Birthday, Johnny!

Yep, my honey, usually referred to in these posts as "J", is 50 years old as of today. Or, uh, I mean he's celebrating the 25th anniversary of his 25th birthday. Something like that! Check out one of my favorite pics of him as a child: Actually this is one of only a very few pics we even have of him as a child. I was the oldest of three in a middle class family, so I have documentary evidence of practically every time I smiled for the first 5 years of my life. J, on the other hand, was the middle child out of nine (!!!) and his parents never had a lot of money for "extras", so there aren't very many pictures of his early years. But there are a few and this one is my favorite - not only because he looks so darn cute in it, but because looming behind him in the photo is The Gate which would come to play a part in his family legends. In this photo he was around 3 years old. It was barely a year later that one day he was playing outside and somehow the gate caught his eye and he started wondering how it worked. The hinges, the latch...how did it all go together and function? Not being one to wonder idly, he took it apart to find out. Can you say "born engineer"? Unfortunately, he was too little to lift the gate back in place and get it put back together, so all the family's cows escaped and his dad and older brothers had to spend a big chunk of the rest of the afternoon rounding them up and herding them back where they belonged. Oops. J was not extremely popular that day. It didn't discourage him, though. Today he's fifty and he still wants to take everything apart to see how it works and to see if he can put it back together in a way that makes it even better than it was before. It can certainly make life interesting around here. Happy birthday, Johnny. Love you lots!