On Being Thirty...Freckles and Gray Hair

I quietly turned the big 3-0 a couple of weeks ago.  Quietly not because I feel strange about this new decade, rather because I didn't know if we would have a new baby at that point, and making grand plans for parties with friends seemed a waste of time on the off-chance that we would need to cancel.  It seemed easier in the long run to just not plan anything.  Brendan and Harry took me CD shopping at Best Buy, and then out to lunch in Saratoga at The Stadium (where, back in my working days, I lunched quite frequently and where I very much enjoy the Saratoga Special), after which we window shopped and ate very good kettle corn purchased from the street vendor.  It was a lovely afternoon, and just what I wanted to do on my last day of 29, in honor of turning thirty.
Turning thirty isn't a very big deal.  It still seems a very young age to me; I am still younger than many of our friends and social acquaintances, and it is not an age when one is allowed any sort of new privilege.  I actually looked forward to being out of my twenties, which always felt to me like the decade of floundering, if not in my own life then certainly in the lives of celebrities, TV personalities, etc.  I have always felt that at thirty, a person has ARRIVED in their life.  They should know what they want to do, they have a better understanding of who they are at the core, and they should have some idea of where their life is going.  To turn 30 felt....good. 
I have noticed a few age-related things since my birthday, though.  It is as if my hair knows I am no longer twenty-something, and has betrayed me by growing in gray!  Not a lot of it, mind you, but specifically the areas along my part and hairline.  And if that weren't bad enough, the gray hairs are decidedly more coarse than my regular hair, and they are also curly, where my brown hair is pin straight.  The result is that my gray hairs stick up out of my hair, curly and noticeable for all of the world to see.   Brendan thinks I am crazy because he hasn't really noticed my onset of gray.  I always thought I would be someone who could go gray naturally, let the sands of time take their toll and all of that.  As it turns out, I am disappointingly vain when it comes to my gray hair.  I dyed it yesterday, and the gray covered nicely.  My new color is cocoa, #24.  And I secretly hate that I feel compelled to dye my hair to hide my aging locks, but not seeing those gray hairs sticking up far outweighs my self-embarrassment for not quite being the person I thought I was.
The second thing I noticed, this morning while applying a bit of makeup to hide the bags under my eyes, is that I am suddenly quite freckled.  When I was a little girl I wanted freckles more than just about anything else.  Back then I did not love my clear, slightly olive skin...I wanted freckles and blond hair, curly hair if I could really have my way.  Those were the features the popular girls in my class shared, and I wanted so badly to be a part of that.  I distinctly remember St. Patrick's Day in the fourth grade, when Mrs. Flynn, our teacher, encouraged us all to dress as leprechauns.  I wore the mandatory green, of course, but I also pocketed my mom's eyeliner before leaving for school.  In the mirror over the water fountain in our classroom I carefully applied brown freckles to each of my cheeks, because in my fourth grade mind I could not possibly look Irish if I didn't have a lovely set of freckles dotting my skin.  Today, looking in the mirror, I saw that my freckles had finally come in, only a few decades too late.  My skin is much fairer now, much more delicate, and the freckles seem strange to me.  What seems really strange is that they seem to have appeared so suddenly, as if someone snuck in while I was sleeping and dotted my face with an eyeliner once again.  Did they really appear suddenly, or have I just been so busy with toddler and marriage and home and life that I didn't notice their arrival?