Happy Birthday!

My oldest darling, the queen of the Nintendo DS/Wii and Hannah Montana crazy daughter, turns 8 today! It's so hard to believe that 8 years ago, I gave birth to her almost to this exact minute as I am typing this post!

She has developed into an amazingly creative and spunky young lady. She can be easily enamored with the simplest of things and finds joy in many things from day to day. I love picking her up at the end of a long day of work. She giggles and tries to bowl me over by running and bumping into me while we're walking to the car until she can make me laugh! And once she gets that first solid belly laugh, she'll wrap her arms around my neck and give me a huge hug and tell me how much she missed me and that she hoped I had a good day. She is the silliest little person I have ever met and yet at times she has a very old soul. She is ingeniously intuitive when in comes to seeing past a person's exterior and body language to know how that person really feels at that time of day. I have seen her comfort her siblings and guide them through new tasks and trials with amazement at what a nurturer she already has become in 8 short years. And in a blink of an eye, she'll be talking in silly voices, trying to tell jokes, or just generally being a goofball just to get someone to smile and laugh. My little lady has grown up so very much in the past 2-3 years; it's been an amazing journey to watch her go through.

But she is such a tough nut to crack! You have to really knead out the inner workings of her mind and emotion to get to know what she's really feeling and thinking. It generally will come sparingly between tumultuous fits and protestations with tons of reassurance. She loves earnestly and openly - I swear she'd bring home every wandering animal to nurture it back to health and hide it in her already cluttered room just to know it was safe.

My favorite things about my sweetheart are her loves of art and reading. On any given day, you'll either find her immersed in a book and enveloped in the world of fantasy that book provides. She'll chatter about every tiny detail if you give her the opportunities. Either that, or you'll find her doodling on anything she can. She's had this remarkable ability to doodle and draw since she was very tiny - even before she can talk. I scanned one of her first recognisable pictures of piglet, drawn when she was barely 20 months old. She continues to amaze me with her artistic abilities!