45 is ...

1. Your plan to have lunch and a massage on your birthday quickly morphs into cleaning up vomit and looking for a two-inch missing wolf spider.

2. You seriously contemplate if the amount of effort it is going to take to lose those stubborn pounds is really worth giving up golden brown fries dipped in ranch.

3. You decide that a Spandex black tennis skirt is perfectly acceptable as a bathing suit bottom.

4. You instantly fall hopelessly in love with anyone who even bothers to card you.

5. You want to yell from the mountaintops to all the teachers at your child's school, and to all of their parents, that once you were really an AWESOME, energetic, top-notch Pinterest-loving room mom. You really were. Now you are more a Publix-made cupcake, and "Oh, it was picture day?" kind of mom.

6. Sometimes when you are taking a picture on your phone and you accidentally flip the camera the other way, you actually scare yourself.

7. You think the filters on Snapchat are the best thing invented since electricity.

8. Your number one shopping question changes from, "Am I thin enough to wear this?" to, "Am I young enough to wear this?"

9. Your girls' beach trips graduate from dancing at the Florabama and morph into decadent dinners and chatting over cocktails in PJs back at the condo.

10. You suddenly begin researching skincare as intently as Jonas Salk trying to crack the code for the polio vaccine.

11. You find yourself wanting to tell some of these younger sports parents that their kids aren't going to play for the Red Sox so calm down and enjoy the ride.

12. You find yourself walking more and more into rooms and wondering why you did...

13. Your days of chasing toddlers and arranging play dates have turned into driving around older kids with jam packed social schedules like you are an Uber driver burning up the streets in New York City.

14. You embrace laugh lines over many of the frozen-faced people you see walking around like live wax museum exhibits. 

15. An organized closet makes you happy. Really happy.

16. In a lot of ways, you still feel exactly the same inside as when you were 25.

17. A smell or a song can still trigger a memory of a college party, or a laugh with friends, or a high school dance so vividly that it can take your breath away.

18. Sometimes you wonder when you are going to feel grown up.

19. When you have on JUST the right pair of reading glasses, you feel a little bit hot...in a mysterious librarian sort of way.

20. Now that you are a parent of tweens and teens, you don't think that on the old sitcom "Roseanne" that she was as bad a parent as you once thought she was.

21.  You wonder how on earth you are going to make the next 45 years as awesome as the first have been.

And last but not least...

22. When it comes to this crazy, precious life you have been given, sometimes you feel like you are just getting started.