Second Daughter Is Five!

Second Daughter turned five a few weeks ago. Here is her annual birthday post.

I think she's the loudest, most rambunctious of our children. First Son has always liked running from one side of the room to the other, but this girl bounces and bounces and bounces. Her laughter fills this house.

She loves to play games and will play Sleeping Queens and Rat-A-Tat-Cat remarkably well, considering she can't add very well yet. She loves playing The Sneaky Snacky Squirrel Game with us, but only uses the squirrel to steal acorns. She will play with Mr. Nobody if everyone else is busy.

She loves to take pictures and movies with our old cameras and received one of her own for her birthday. Many of her movies are spinning ones - she stands in the middle of a room holding the camera and spins. Those make us a little queasy, but we love watching the others. She narrates them, so they tell us exactly what's going on in her head.

I think First Daughter took this picture.

Her favorite meal is Kansas Dad's famous baked macaroni and cheese. Put some Cheetos on the plate alongside and she'll be in heaven. She loves sweets of any kind, especially trips to those frozen yogurt stores where you can load up on toppings. She likes to put as many toppings as possible on, one scoop of every kind if we'd let her.

Her favorite toys: dress up sticker dolls, Playmobil people (especially any set that involves babies or real water), LEGOs (if the older two are playing with them), dressing up, playing house or "vacation" (when they pack a random assortment of items and camp out under blanket tents in the living room), Little People, blocks, SuperMind and MightyMind Aquarium Adventure.

She wanted a LEGO party for her birthday so the boys would have fun. (They wouldn't want to come to a princess party or anything, you know.) A wonderful friend of mine made the exact LEGO cake she wanted in the shape of a five.

Sadly, she stepped on a LEGO while racing through the house at her party which seems to have given her an infection on the bottom of her foot. So, for what I think is the first time in her life, she's taking a round of antibiotics.

Her favorite books: The Seven Silly Eaters, Stuck, Extra Yarn, and has recently asked us to read a lot of Richard Scarry stories. She'll say she loves every book we own and she's just as excited by the weekly library bag as the others. She still likes to stack up all the books from a shelf and look through them one by one.

birthday morning

She didn't want a pancake as big as her head for her birthday because she said she couldn't eat it all. She refused silver dollar pancakes or a mouse pancake or any other shape or configuration. Kansas Dad offered to make chocolate-chocolate chip pancakes for her, and those she accepted.

For her birthday she wanted a stuffed Minion (from Despicable Me).

She loves playing with First Daughter, whenever she can lure her away from First Son. She plays wonderfully with Second Son, sometimes.

She loves the new playset.

She and Second Son look so alike, you could almost imagine they were twins if they weren't obviously two years apart.

She has recently discovered Mario Kart on the Wii and will sometimes choose that for her screen "time." I'm pretty sure she can beat me at it.

Kansas Dad built a new playset in our backyard (with many thanks to Grammy and PawPaw). It took Second Daughter only a few minutes to realize she had mastered the monkey bars.

She took swimming lessons for the second time this year, and for the second time had to leave before or during her lesson because Second Son had an emergency. (Last year, he fell and broke his two top teeth. This year, he threw up all over me, not just a little, really threw up all over me.) She was very sad to leave, but Kansas Dad promised her a trip to the pool just the two of them on one of her outings and she had a great time. She passed Level 1 this year, too, and was very proud of all her new skills.

Second Daughter and Mama on a fancy night out.

Her favorite color is rainbow.

Sometimes she wants to wear lots of layers and sometimes she wants to wear a dress without any pants underneath. She does still often choose a dress to wear rather than pants or shorts.

Lately she has taken to wearing her tennis shoes without socks. She has more pairs of shoes than anyone else in the house and wears them all, as the spirit moves. She has used her own money to purchase shoes at least twice this summer alone.

Mother's Day 2013

She's five, but one of her favorite games is still to dump out as many containers as she can in the living room. She's always does a better job cleaning up if someone helps her.

She graduated from our local library's story hour this past spring. She's been going there pretty much since she was born, certainly before she was one!

She loves to color, cut, snip, glue, and create masterpieces with the contents of the craft box. The more she can cut and glue, in fact, the better. She can go through twenty sheets of paper in as many minutes.

She can write her name, though she often starts at the bottom of her letters. She has expressed an interest in reading, so we're going to work on that a little in the fall, when she begins kindergarten (or kindergarten part one, depending on how it goes - she'll be such a young kindergartener, I may extend kindergarten over two years).

She will carry crayons to every room of the house. She's not so prone to writing on the walls anymore, but they are a bit too inviting for her younger brother.

Making Lenten pretzels

Sometimes she wants ice in her water, sometimes not. Sometimes she wants a breakable plate, other times her plastic flower one. Sometimes she wants an omelet at breakfast, sometimes scrambled eggs. She loves pancakes and waffles with as many kinds of syrup as we'll allow.

The birthday girl and boy

Happy birthday, my sweet Second Daughter! May the coming year be full of laughter and adventure!