Birthday Post (Do not read if allergic to schmaltz!)

It's my birthday! Well, it's 17 minutes into my birthday and I've just got back from a night at the theatre. When I go to bed and wake up again it will be properly my birthday!
This is in effect my third birthday as a kinkster. The first time, I was barely “out”, and certainly wasn't going to be getting any spankings, though co-incidentally (and I had to check to make sure I'd remembered correctly!) it was the day that a small if ultimately very significant event happened in my kinky life: Abel sent me a mail in reply to a comment I'd made on the Spanking Writers blog. While it was lovely to receive at the time, I didn't realise what a huge impact that mail would have on my life.
Indirectly, it was the cause of my first ever birthday spanking, one year later. Or possibly birthday spanking(s), five I believe in total, at a spanking club. Of course, as we were there as Lowewood girls, it was actually Jemima receiving the birthday spankings, not me, so the total number of strokes was considerably lower than it otherwise would have been (thank goodness!)
This year, like the first kinky year, will be lacking in birthday spankings. Not that I'm complaining, I have plenty of other fun things to keep me occupied over the next couple of weeks, but they are all of the very vanilla variety. In a way though, that makes me feel even more blessed. Yes, I might not be getting a birthday spanking tomorrow, but I get to spend time with family, and then next weekend time with many friends, some of whom know my secret, none of whom have rejected me for it. Since I came out more into this strange and wonderful world of ours, I haven't always been the best friend in the world to my friends “from before”, but the fact that they are still so lovely to me, despite this, makes me feel like the luckiest (if most undeserving!) girl in the world.
Of course, to add to these friends, I have a whole other set of amazing kinky friends who I also feel incredibly blessed to have, and who have enriched my life no end over the past couple of years.
Sorry, this is probably a terribly nauseating post – I'll stop with the nice soon, and you can all go and find a sick bucket, but as it's my birthday, you'll have to indulge me for a couple more sentences.
There's a line in the Sound of Music, in the song called “Something Good”, which goes something like “for somewhere in my youth or childhood, I must have done something good.” And that's what I feel, because while I may not be getting a birthday spanking today, the fact that I have such lovely people around me means that I'm one hell of a lucky girl.