It was a big weekend for us last week. On Sunday our younger grandson Jack was baptized at Grace Episcopal Church and on Monday I celebrated my 69th birthday, if ‘celebrate’ is the correct verb to describe the occasion of making my last birthday pit stop on my way to turning 70 next year.

My daughter-in-law made a delicious Nutella-based birthday cake and our older grandson Owen helped me blow out the 69 candles. (Here’s a pro tip: You know you’re getting old when the number of birthday candles you need costs more than the cake). My son gave me a gift certificate to buy a book at Eagle Harbor bookstore because, as all wise people know, outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Of course, inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read. (Thank you Groucho Marx!). My daughter also gave me a book as a birthday gift. I can’t tell you how happy it made me feel to have both of my kids give me a book for my birthday. I guess they have been paying more attention to what I do with my leisure time than I thought.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about turning 69. It seems like being 69 should make me feel old, but I really don’t feel any different today than I did last week when I was a spry young man of 68. It helps to keep reminding myself that 69 may be on the older side for homo sapiens, but it’s young for a tree and only midlife for an elephant or a tortoise. I’ve tried telling people who ask about my birthday that I am only 828 months old. Turns out just saying that makes me feel and sound as old as an Old Testament patriarch. On the plus side, in dog years I’m not even 10 yet.

In preparation for my birthday and the baptism celebrations, Wendy and I spent a lot of time this past month doing yardwork, most of which involved some variation on the theme of pulling weeds. If our vegetables showed the same tenacity and grew as quickly as our weeds, I could retire and still feed the world with time left over to improve my golf game. In the course of working in the yard, Wendy had an unfortunate fall and broke a couple of ribs. I say ‘unfortunate’ both because broken ribs are terribly painful, and also because the broken ribs mean that I have had to take over the grocery shopping and some of the cooking chores around the house while Wendy recovers. That’s a scary enough proposition to motivate anyone to do anything that might possibly promote a speedier recovery.

Wendy and I have known each other for 50 years now, and are obviously pretty compatible, but we do have our quirks and differences. And many of those differences seem to manifest themselves in the area of household chores. For example, I load the dishwasher neatly from the back to the front. Wendy does not, following a different, more impressionistic approach to dishwasher loading. When I cook, I like to wash pots, pans and other cooking utensils as I go. Wendy prefers to stack all dirty cooking utensils to the sink once their purpose has been served and leave clean-up to the end of the evening. I like to smash aluminum cans and break down cardboard boxes in the house before I take them out to the recycling bin. Wendy does not.

Wendy is very careful about sorting laundry by color, material, temperature, delicacy and washing instructions on clothing labels. I have only recently embraced the concept of separating light and dark loads. Wendy folds clothes from the dryer meticulously and always folds all towels and napkins the same way so they stack neatly and uniformly in our cupboards and drawers. I never fold any two towels or napkins the same way twice – come to think of it, I never fold pants, shirts or other clothing items the same way twice. I like folded towels and napkins to have an eclectic, bohemian, free-spirited look.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

With the birthday and the baptism behind us and Wendy’s ribs on the mend, I’ve had a chance to reflect a bit on my life as I approach the big Seven-Oh. And rather than wring my hands over growing older, lament the state of the world, second-guess decisions I‘ve made over the years, or exist in a grumpy state of sustained peevishness, I’ve decided to spend the remaining days I’m allotted on this Earth counting my blessings and enjoying the many gifts I’ve been afforded in my life. I read somewhere that infants laugh up to 300 times a day, teenagers laugh on average six times a day, and people over 60 only laugh 2.5 times a day. Gandhi said you have to become the change you want to see in the world, and the change I most want to see is more laughter and less angst and anger. That, and a weed that pulls itself.

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper.