It’s hard to believe that the kid that made me a Mom turned 7 years old in August!
There is something about the gift of a firstborn that unlike anything else. Celebrating her birthday always reminds me of my own birthday of becoming a Mom. And what a gift that was.
Before we dive into her 7th birthday, let’s have a little throwback…
40 weeks pregnant.
And freshly born… So hard to believe how much my life changed over the course of 8ish hours!
In my mind, birthdays are a very big deal, but we also like to keep things fairly simple as a family. We haven’t established any kinds of rules about birthday parties or birthday presents, we just kind of ask the kids what they want a few weeks before. It’s not always a friend party- sometimes we go do a big family outing (like the zoo, or entertainment junction, etc). This year my parents made a trip out to Ohio just to be here for Tera’s birthday! And that was super special because they have only been in the States for her birth and her 3rd birthday!
This year Tera asked for a friend party, so we made a little list and I texted those friends to invite them to come over on a Sunday afternoon. On Saturday night I decided we would have the kids decorate their own cupcakes. Then I last minute decided they could just bake the dessert themselves, too! We stopped at Walmart after church and got some cookie mixes and some decorating supplies. We had about 9 girls, so I split them into two groups and let each group mix up a batch of cookies.
I let the kiddos play while the cookies were baking and then called them all back to the table for decorating!
They had a BLAST decorating their cookies! I think we had enough for each girl to decorate 3, and they wished they had more!
Cookie decorating was the only thing I had planned for the birthday party, so after the girls had finished decorating, we sang to Tera and let the girls loose to play again.
Tera opened her presents, which consisted entirely of crafts, unicorns, more crafts and crafty unicorns!
Once all the ladies went home, we all crashed hard! The party went well, but it just ended up taking a lot of energy! We had my parents, Theo and I all home for the party, and we were ALL so exhausted that night. I think we were in bed by 8:30! And if that doesn’t describe parenting, I’m not sure what does!
Happy 7th Birthday, sweet girl! You are fiercely independent, gracious, loving, and always calm, cool and collected. You know your strengths and weaknesses and decided 3 years ago that you want to be a zoologist. You haven’t mentioned anything else since, and it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if you stuck through with that. You are the first to run to the fridge to grab an ice pack if someone in the family gets hurt and you are always helping Daddy out with all his projects. You love to play school and boss your little brothers around, but the truth is that they trust and respect you so much that they don’t mind listening to you (most of the time)! You are starting to build friendships outside of our family and sending you off to 2nd grade this year has stretched my Mama heart because for the first time in a long time, you aren’t in my care all day long, since I was your 1st grade teacher at school and Kindergarten was cut short with pandemic life. You are a joy, a delight, and sometimes a little bit subtly snarky and defiant. You know what you like and what you don’t and make those things work for you. We are so proud of you and cannot wait to see where life takes you!
