At the end of November, on a quiet day, neatly tucked between Harlow’s birthday (November 15th) and Mazzy’s birthday (December 9th) and almost always completely overshadowed by Thanksgiving, is a much lesser known occasion otherwise known as MY birthday. The best thing about having your birthday be mostly ignored, is that you can just keep on pretending that if nobody notices, you remain the same age. So, I could be 45, as my license suggests, or I could be 35, which was the last time that my birthday was fully recognized as it’s own thing.

Either way, I was still thrilled to accept breakfast in bed from my children, which consisted of challah french toast, coffee and a little porcelain panda sitting inside a plush doughnut that when pressed, sings “Happy Birthday.”

It felt wildly appropriate since much of my life now revolves around pandas and doughnuts, Harlow’s two main obsessions. She had a panda doughnut birthday party on Friday, but we will get to that at a later date. For right now, let’s get to the weekly newsletter, which has slowly morphed into more of a monthly newsletter. Do you like the newsletter? Do you read it? Should I try to get it back to my weekly schedule? Why is everything so damn hard??? These are a few of the questions that I would love you to answer in the comments below.

Since this recap is covering so much, I’m going to keep it short and sweet.

I made a list of the seven things I love about Harlow on her 7th birthday and shared how we spent her actual birthday with family.

While Halloween is long over, I highly recommend reading about our INCREDIBLE experience riding a float in the New Orlean’s Halloween parade, which is worth it for the pictures alone. It was probably one of the happiest moments my family has ever had together. Mazzy said it ranked right up there with our trip to Disney World, which is high praise indeed.

I also wrote about our Halloween in New York City. Mazzy dressed as VSCO Unicorn and Harlow dressed as Fashion Panda. If you don’t know what a Fashion Panda is, you can read the origin story here. But my Halloween post is worth checking out just so you can watch the video of Harlow singing “Don’t Give Up on Me” (her favorite Andy Grammer song) in front of a crowd in order to get a full-size Twix bar.

Speaking of Harlow’s favorite song, we took Mazzy and Harlow to their very first concert!

In the spirit of Thanksgiving this week, I shared a list of both heartfelt and hilarious Thanksgiving family traditions. They were all submitted by followers of @mommyshortssquad on Instagram, which I highly recommend following! We also made a list of 26 acts of kindness from strangers on a plane, and they are guaranteed to make you feel better about the state of humanity. I know that’s a pretty big promise, but I stand by it.

Okay. I think that’s it for now. Gotta plan Mazzy’s birthday party, come up with an act for Mike’s family’s annual talent show, get movie tickets for all the cousins to see Frozen and make two side dishes.

Happy Thanksgiving!