Happy Birthday Sweet Pea!

Yep, it's her birthday. She's four. Four! Where did those four years go? And yet, they were intense and very full years. Full of childhood firsts - since she is our first, every new thing Sweet Pea does is a childhood first around here.

This girl is amazing and funny and smart and creative and pretty and artistic and silly beyond measure. Over the past year she has become increasingly independent, mostly due to the arrival of her baby sister shortly before her third birthday. She has started to read a tiny bit and she loves to make the sounds in words and tell me what letter words start with. She love to rhyme. She love to make up silly lyrics to tunes that she knows. Those lyrics invariably involve a cat or two.

Yep, she's still completely enamored of cats. Though to tell you the truth, she has spent far more time over the past few days playing with "roly polys." One day a couple weeks ago she found a roly poly walking across the floor in the family room (eww) and adopted it as her pet for the day. She put it in her sand bucket and went outside and got it some grass to eat. I looked up roly polys/pill bugs/sow bugs online to find out what they actually eat, and it turns out they're scavengers (double eww) so I told her to find them some old roots to eat. At some point during the day she decided that her isopod friend looked lonely so she went to the back yard, poked around in the flower beds, and found it two friends. All three bugs remained alive for the entire day despite her pulling them out periodically to let them crawl around on her hands and occasionally dropping them on the floor. I made her put them back outside at night, safe under a rock where there were plenty of roots for them to eat. The next morning she was so bummed that they weren't still under the same rock, waiting for her.

I related this story to her grandmothers and one of them bought her a little "bug shack" for her birthday. So now she thinks it's her solemn duty to remove roly polys from their backyard habitat and try to take care of them in her little bug cage. Three of them have died since yesterday morning... so she went out and got another one. At least she left the dead ones in there - the new one should have more to eat than the old ones did. (EWWW!)

What? Oh, the pictures? Well, it's a long story. The short version is that she wanted to try on some dresses that my sister sent years ago, before Sweet Pea was born. She didn't just want to try them on one at a time; in these pictures she's wearing three dresses. I told Sweet Pea that her auntie would like to see pictures of her in the dresses so she got incredibly silly and had me take pictures of her in countless poses. She calls the pose above"Big Scary Kitty" - it's supposed to be a Yoga pose. Tee hee!

This is "Little Scary Kitty."

If I were writing this at a better time of day, rather than 12:20am, I might write a better birthday tribute to my sweetiekins, but this will have to do for now. At least I'm posting it on her actual birthday instead of late...