Cheers to 28 Years! Annual Blog Birthday List

Hello and happy Monday! Today is my 28th birthday and I'm feeling quite content after a wonderful weekend with my love. We spent the weekend in St. Augustine and I'll absolutely be filling you in our trip a little later in the week. In the meantime, it's time to celebrate my birthday in blog style, which means I'm sharing my annual blog birthday list with you all today.

Since I started blogging 3+ years ago, each year I’ve come up with a new theme for a blog birthday list. For example, last year I wrote a list of 27 things I still didn’t know how to do yet. I’ve also done a birthday bucket list of 26 things I wanted to do on my birthday and for my 25th birthday, I wrote a list of things I’d learned in my 25 years.

This year, I wasn’t sure what to do but I wanted to switch it up again. Jonathan took me away for the weekend and I thought it would be fun to come up with a list of 28 random acts of kindness for us to perform throughout the weekend. His response? “Only you would give yourself work on your birthday.” He loved the idea of trying to perform RAKs throughout the weekend, but he didn’t loooove giving ourselves a list and focusing on checking things off that list instead of relaxing and enjoying our time together. He makes a good point. I tend to get a little ahead of myself and I can imagine I would have ended up stressing about the list instead of enjoying every moment with my love.

Don’t you worry though, I think I came up with a plan that still accomplishes what I want to do without taking over our weekend away together. I’m doing a reversed birthday list of sorts this year. Instead of writing a list of RAKs to perform in advance, I’m challenging myself to perform 28 of them throughout my birthday week and share them with you all once it’s over! It'll be fun to keep an eye out for opportunities throughout the day where I can do something small for someone else, rather than coming up with my list of things to do in advance. Needless to say, I'm excited to kick off my 28th year this way.

After spending a relaxing weekend in St. Augustine with Jonathan, I'm feeling so at peace and so grateful for this time in my life. My 27th year was full of joy and so many reasons to be thankful...I can only imagine the blessings 28 will bring. Cheers!

If you have any suggestions for Random Acts of Kindness I can perform this week, I'd love to hear your ideas! Share them in the comments or tweet them to me @AmandaLSnyder13 on Twitter!