Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Birthdays are great as a kid because presents seem to be given to you for free, without any strings attached. As you grow older and have a family, you realize that Birthday presents are being purchased out of your communal funds and, indirectly, you are buying your own gifts. This conundrum has drained some of the magic from birthdays for me. I'm not sure how to clearly explain it, but gifts received for free always seem a bit different than a gift which costs our family. This makes the gift seem less like a gift, more like a present to yourself.

This week, we celebrated our Unbirthdays. Rebecca has been trying for the past year to get anything of interest from Craigslist or freecycle. We haven't been able to get anything for free because of the overuse of these sites in the Bay Area. It almost makes winning the lottery seem more likely. But for our unbirthday week, (which we hadn't even planned) we won two free bookcases. Our books had been overflowing on our shelves (worse than we thought to fill up two complete bookshelves!) and we were glad to get the free bookcases even if they were a bit ratty. That is how our unbirthday started on Tuesday. A friend from church took me in his truck to pick up the bookcases while Rebecca found some more luck and was able to go pick up a free jogging stroller (which we won't be able to use for another year, which is okay because some repairs need to happen to it first). After heavily dusting the bookshelves, we stayed up until well past midnight setting up our shelves and organizing the books into a sensible spacial distribution. Three gifts for free! Call that an unbirthday? Well, it goes on.

I was accepted for residency tuition. This saves us approximately four to five thousand dollars a semester. If that isn't a great free gift, then I don't know what is. And during the next 24 hours we managed to trade company stocks which doubled our investment (another free gift) and our anniversary present arrived in the mail several weeks early and surprised us. Well, things for our unbirthdays were going great. So we topped it off by going to a free movie and watching the Simpsons, courtesy of Discovercard bonus award. Which, by the way, exceeded my very low expectations.

With unbirthdays out of the way, we could focus more on birthdays coming up, including the smallest birthdays. Thursday evening we spent 3 hours in a birthing class, not for free. I tried to come up with as many questions as I could, since there are averages which books don't tell you and expectancies that, although there isn't any normal birth, give us a better idea of what we should be expecting with labor. I would say it was a productive evening. I wasn't expecting much.

Friday night we swam in the pool, after a long hot day. Saturday we went to a free performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Cupertino. The San Francisco Shakespeare company puts on free Shakespeare in the park every year and they tour the performances around the Bay Area. We got there about an hour early and the amphitheater was already packed with people and their picnics. For future notice, get to the park by 6pm (the show started at 7:30pm). Our friends brought some bread, crackers, salami, fancy cheeses; this was really the best way to have an outdoor dinner before a fancy show [we brought a salad -- finger foods were a bit easier to deal with]. The performance was so well done, I felt bad leaving without paying -- we dished up whatever cash we had to their donations box after the performance [we never carry much cash on us, so it wasn't much...]. Although Midsummer Night's Dream is one of the more difficult works to follow, this company did a wonderful job of presenting the show. We intend on making this a staple of our summers in the Bay Area; we're excited to see which Shakespeare play they put on next year.