Happy Birthday, Esther!

In our family, we now have three birthdays within two weeks.  First Daniel, then me, then Esther.  (Poor Tim has to wait until September for his.  I tell him that our next child needs to have a September birthday; he tells me that two is plenty!)

Esther celebrated her 5th birthday this past week, while we were still in Phoenix visiting Tim's family.  We started out by all swimming in the hotel pool.  Esther could stay in the water for hours and not get bored.  Then we went over to Tim's mom's house and Esther spent the afternoon playing with Grandma and Daddy and the dogs and kitten while Daniel and I helped Tim's sister with a bookcase replacement project.  In the evening, all of Tim's siblings and their families came over for dinner and an ice cream cake, and both the kids got their birthday presents from that side of the family.  Esther liked everything she got, but the funniest thing was her reaction to her gift card from Amazon.com.  She was beyond thrilled with it!  I don't know if she had any clear idea what she could use it for, but Daniel is crazy about Amazon and also had gotten an Amazon card, so Esther thought she was big stuff to have one of her own.  She thinks she is going to use it to buy a pillow pet.  She has been asking for one for months, and I have been refusing to buy it for her because I think they're a pointless fad.  But I remember how fun it was to have a grandparent buy me something that my parents had declined to spend their money on, so I will admit I was the one who suggested a pillow pet as a use for the gift card.  I suggested some other possibilities too, but the pillow pet was the idea that she loved.  (She also wants an iPie--aka iPod--but there is no way we are letting a five-year-old have a personal $175 electronic device!)

Esther is very proud of being five.  She is working on a mental timeline of her life, and will frequently ask me things like, "How old was I when we did X?  Could I talk then?"  Since X is often an event within the last year, her questions can come out sounding pretty funny.  She loves to talk about what she did when she was a baby, but is a little less invested in being a baby than she was even a few months ago.  She does, however, still love her green blankie and still love to be picked "uppy."  But even green blankie is fading slightly in importance; one day we went to look for it at bedtime and were shocked to find it still in her bed where she had left it when she got up in the morning!  That was just a one-time occurrence, however, and blankie frequently keeps her company while playing or snuggling, and comes along in the car with us when we go to church or on outings.

The world is blessed that there is an Esther in it, and we are especially blessed to have been entrusted with parenting her.  Happy birthday to our sweet, almost-grown-up-but-not-too-big-to-snuggle five-year-old!