Happy birthday Mommy!

Yesterday was my birthday. My 36th birthday to be exact. And my first birthday as a mom. It was also a Friday which is one of my new weekend days ever since going back to work at 4 days a week.

So I was pretty excited to not work on my birthday, spend the day with Fay, and go out to a special dinner with Ryan in the evening. But when I went to get Fay at 5:55am there was a little greeting card in her crib with the word "Mommy" scribbled on the envelope in what appeared to be crayon.

After nurisng Fay we opened the card together and it told me that Daddy was sending me away to a special place for my birthday and that Fay would miss me.

I was put into a cab at 9:30 and sent to an address in Chinatown. I arrived and discovered the address housed a day spa. I then proceeded to have 7.5 HOURS OF TREATMENTS. Geez! It didn't seem that long when I was doing them all. Heres the run down. I got 1) A full body scrubbing/cleansing. 2) Green Salad while waiting for 3) Facial. 4) Ham and Egg sandwich while waiting for 5) 2 hr massage. 6)Snack of dried fruit, nuts and RITZ CRACKERS! (my favorite) while waiting for 7)Pedicure and Manicure.

It was 4:30 before I looked at the clock and rushed out of the spa, my boobs a yearning for some nursing. (I asked Ryan if I should bring the pump on my surprise outing since I'm still nursing Fay and he thought I should be back by 3pm. That seemed long, but doable)

I have to describe one of the treatments which was the most foreign to me. I've gotten plenty of massages and pedicures. I've even had one or two facials. But I've never had a full body scrubdown like I received immediately upon arriving at the spa.

Normally when you enter a massage room, the masseuse asks you to disrobe as they leave the room for privacy. I had no idea what treatment I was receiving upon arriving, but I knew something was up when the woman giving me the treatment asked me to disrobe and step into an oval tub while she stood there waiting. I have no modesty issues, but it was different enough to point out.

I stepped into a bath of flower petals and lemons. The woman squeezed the lemons into the water and then bathed me. She took a washcloth to my arms, legs, chest and back. It was pretty nice. The bath was relatively brief and next she led me to a table and instructed me to lie face down. The table felt like a thin water bed; I was lying on some kind of gel filled padding. The woman began to slather some kind of exfoliating soap/gel over my entire body piece by piece.

After a solid 30-40 minutes of scrub down, she took a break and was shuffling around the room preparing something. My eyes had a towel over them so it was all unknown to me. I assumed she would be cleaning me again in the oval bath because I had gotten pretty covered in the soap/gel.

I started feeling some mist on my left side and I thought to myself "geez, its been so professional and well done so far. I'm surprised she is accidentally splashing me while she's preparing my bath. Of course she wasn't "accidentally" splashing me. She was starting up this LONG horizontal pole of 5 shower heads. She moved the shower heads back and forth above my body and rinsed me off, all the while massaging me a bit.

I started thinking...."wow, I wonder if anyone in this world wakes up to a treatment like this. Some rich royalty somewhere has a woman spend an hour and a half in a dark room cleaning them before their day begins." I doubt it.

So that was the start to my birthday. Which has now been renamed my-best-birthday-ever. After a full day of treatment, I went home to play with my baby girl and then Ryan took me out for a yummy dinner and some music. We saw 2 African Jazz groups at Joe's Pub and they were amazing.

Now I'm just a little worried about what I can possibly do for his birthday. But I have until December.