Spoiled? Not Sos You'd Notice

OK. When I started this blog, my Squishy (also known as Ladybug) looked something like this.




After a year or so, she'd mellowed, allowed a little more of her true world domination power to escape, and had barely grown some hair:



A year after that, there was more hair, an intense knowledge of the power of the big baby blues, and a tendency for purple, pink, princess dresses and a disdain for housecleaning of any stamp (or maybe that was just me:-)



And the year she turned three, we really knew we were in trouble. I mean... seriously. Look at her. Men would kill and die for her, just from this picture alone:



When she turned four, she wore a sweater mama made in her two favorite colors (guess!) and made sure her brother stood next to her to help her blow out the candles. This was the year she got the doll in the cake, and the year her birthday came right at Easter, which was a BAAAAAADDD thing because it made her assume that the ENTIRE FRICKIN WORLD gathered for her birthday and her birthday alone.



This year, we did our damnedest to live up to that:






I don't venture to guess what next year holds for my dessert baby. Probably not quite this extravagance--for one thing, this happened the way extravagance does--with very little planning on my part. But I do know that she just, as I was typing this, came out and asked me to sing her a lullaby.

I sang her "Sunrise, Sunset," from Fiddler on the Roof, because just like seedlings turn overnight to sunflowers, my dessert baby has blossomed before your eyes to a sturdy force of nature, a blinding smile, and my youngest daughter, who still needs to snuggle in the morning, but has us all wrapped around her finger by the night.

Happy Birthday, Squishy. You fill my days with sweetness, with plenty enough tart and spice to keep it interesting. I love you more than words, more than pictures, bigger than sky, deeper than blue, and more far away than sparkling stars. You have made me exasperated, crazy, grateful, and sane, and you are, just like words, knitting, your brothers and your sister, proof to your mother that there is a divine force in the universe, and that when it conspired to make you, that force was full of win:-)