Today is my husband's forty-first birthday. That sounds really old to him, and I'm having more than a little trouble coming up with sympathetic clucks to go along with his deep-felt anxieties over heading toward fifty ... yes, that's where he's going with this already ... and watching the last dregs of youth slide away into the ever-diminishing sunset.

He was twenty-six when we met, and he won't be as old as I was then until next year, so whining around the fringes of forty-one somehow rhyming with ancient doesn't work for me.

At forty-one I donned a backpack and took off around the world ... alone. Before the days of Internet access from developing nations and global cell phone use, a forty-one-year old woman taking off for parts unknown was very much like dropping off the face of the earth; in other words, not for wimps or geezers.

Remembering back and looking at photos, I'd say forty-one and forty-two were the years I was at my hottest, and bits didn't really start to move south until a few years later when I did, too, with a move to the Southern Hemisphere ... not that I think that was the cause.

When I took on this Older Parent Blog in addition to International Adoption, I was slightly amused by the realization that when it comes to parenting, so many think of OVER FORTY as beyond creaky, teeth-in-the-water-glass, careful-not-to-break-a-hip old.

Even dear Mark, now that he's OVER FORTY, is sorely tempted to buy into that image, kiss his dewy youth goodbye and jump straight into full geezerishness with something approaching relish.

Yeah. Right. Like that's gonna happen when he's married to me. Let's get some grip of a perspective here, shall we?

Heck! I went out and got me one whole new life at forty-one, then added another on to that one at fifty-one when we brought Sam home. Fifty-three, and Cj joins our lives, and although she's probably the last child for us, we're nowhere near done doing wonderfully exciting things that bring new adventures, challenges and experiences.

If Mark even begins to think that he's heading for the end, my foot will be straight up his backside reminding him that there are many things he hasn't even begun.

I recall reading a comment a while back where a woman was relating sentiments from her 90-something-year old father. When asked what he would do differently in his life, had he the chance to redo, he answered that he wished he'd not convinced himself that he was old in his 50s and 60s. He wasted a lot of time doing that.

My ongoing gift to my husband is my cheerfully nagging reminders that he is every bit as young, as handsome, as sexy and as wonderful now as he has ever been. In fact, he truly grows more beautiful to me every year.

Happy birthday, my love.

The photos are all from our family collection. The first is with his sister, Jane, in the early '70s.